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Just as paper and pens have been available from multiple manufacturers and vendors , document file formats and the applications creating these file formats need to be supported by and available from multiple vendors. This guarantees long-term access to data, even if companies disappear, change their strategies or dramatically change their prices. The formats in which information is published can either be “open” or “closed”. Open format means the software and format are available to anyone, free of charge, and available for people to build into their own software and products without limitation set by intellectual property rights. Developers can use these to produce multiple software packages, services, and products by using these formats.
Basically: A file’s format – the way that it’s saved and encoded – determines what you can do with it and which programs can open it.
A “closed” file format is one that is proprietary – that is, trademarked and therefore only to be used by those who have paid for the rights to use – and the specification is not publicly available or because the file format is proprietary and even though the specification has been made public, reuse is limited. Using proprietary file formats for which the specification is not publicly available can create dependence on third-party software or file format license holders. The latter type of closed format can cause significant challenges to reusing the information encoded in it, forcing those who wish to use the information to buy the necessary software.
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Converting proprietary formats to open formats
A file’s format – the way that it’s saved and encoded – determines what you can do with it and which programs can open it. The application you used to create the original file will let you save it as something else. If, for example, you’re viewing a document online in Google Docs, you can click File and Download to bring up a list of formats to which you can convert the document. These include Microsoft Word, PDF, and plain text.
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So, if you want to share your work, but also want to protect it in some way, it's important to know and consider the licensing options available for your work.
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The Creative Commons is a movement that was started by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig to encourage creative people to offer up their creative works – protected by copyright law – for others to legally build upon and share, including text, music, pictures, and video.
Creative Commons licenses are easy-to-understand copyright licenses that allow creators of content to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of other users. Creative Commons licenses don't replace copyright, but they do mean that you don't have to negotiate individually over specific rights for pieces of content. Crucially, the license were was designed specifically to work with the webinternet, so that content that is offered under their the terms of the Creative Commons is easy to search for, discover, and use. Around 500 million works have been licensed under Creative Commons since it launched. Having said that,
Creative Commons is not an appropriate license for software code, rather than . It is a better fit for creative assets (like images or audio) used in software projects.
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This lets other people distribute, remix, and build upon your work -- – even commercially -- – as long as they credit you. This is the most flexible of licenses.
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This lets other people distribute, remix and build upon your work -- – even commercially -- – as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the same terms. All new works based on yours will therefore have the same license. This is the license used by Wikipedia.
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This lets other people distribute, remix, and build upon your work as long as they credit you and don't use it for commercial projects . Although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial– this means it cannot be sold or used for profit. The creator has to attribute you to the original work, they don't have to license their derivative works on the works that they created based on yours with the same terms.
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)
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For content (including graphics, video, audio, and similar creative assets) we use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That ensures openIMIS assets are re mixable by otherscan be remixed by other users and creators, yet openIMIS is credited and derivation work which that is based on our assets need to have the same license.
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