[Southeast-US] projects? "GIS Tutorial for Atmospheric Sciences"

[Vaclav Petras]

On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 9:45 PM, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> Randal Hale Wed, 06 May 2015 20:21:30 -0400
> > Since NCAR owns [the "GIS Tutorial for Atmospheric Sciences"] I
wouldn't feel great about just "changing it"
>
> AFAICS we could absolutely *fork* it and reverse-engineer. UCAR/NCAR ~=
Federal government, and (unless otherwise noted) federally-funded materials
are public-domain. Furthermore, fork/recreate is pretty clearly "fair use,"
and there's no licensing on any of those pages that even tries to
discourage that.

You should check with them and with the funding agency. Their Term of Use
[1] are quite strict. On the other hand, the work was "Sponsored by NSF"
[2] which might mean that the work must be somehow open and moreover, you
say that they are Federal government (but I'm not familiar with how this
actually works). Their Terms of Use speak about free for non-commercial
which might actually fulfill NSF requirements (I'm just thinking aloud, I
don't have any idea). To such work one could apply CC BY-NC license.
However, this does not fulfill our (or at least my) criteria of open (to
anybody) and free (as in freedom). This would align with CC BY or CC BY-SA
licenses (or in case of Public Domain, CC0). How much can fit into fair use
is also a good question. I guess radical changes might be needed to adopt
the material to a different software.

Vaclav

[1] http://www2.ucar.edu/terms-of-use (perhaps some general one?)
[2] http://gis.ucar.edu/projects/course-introduction-gis (page footer)
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