[License-discuss] Data portability as an obligation under an open source license

[VanL]

Hi Christine,

On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 11:42 AM Christine Hall <christine at fossforce.com>
wrote:

> I understand that. However, it seems to me that requirement would be
> outside the scope of an open source software license. As has been
> pointed out, ownership of the data and the requirement to return it or
> not is already covered by law in many jurisdictions, and in any
> jurisdictions where it's not, it will be eventually. So isn't this an
> issue that would be better sorted out through legal systems than through
> software licensing. This seems like an overreach to me.
>

Reflecting back, I hear two objections:
1) This is already the law in many places, and you expect it to be the law
more broadly in the future.
2) This is overreach for a software license.

Regarding 1): The flipside of your point is that this is not the law in
many jurisdictions. And if it is already required in some places, then what
is the harm?
Regarding 2): Data access is not out of scope for software licensing
generally; there are many examples of licenses that do or do not allow for
data access. I have personally negotiated a number of enterprise licensing
deals where data access was an explicit term in the agreement. So if it is
not out of scope for software licenses as a whole, that reduces the
question to whether this is out of scope for open source software. If that
is so, I would like to understand where in the OSD that is being found.

Thanks,
Van
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