Das License?

[jsonin]

What's the license on this beauty?
Apache, MIT, or... ?

[ftrotter]

Well.. This project is something more like a License than it is software that is licensed.

Obviously, using the schema is free and anyone is welcome to use it without cost.

But if it was "open source" then deravites would be acceptable and frankly, the whole point of this is to be a standard that you either adhere to or do not. If people could download the schema, and then remove a field or change the layout of the files... then that ends up making it harder to the end user to work with the data.. and negates the value of the schema.

So my top candidate for the license is creative commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

This would not allow for derivatives but ensure that we had a reliable license that people could trust (i.e. not written by us, just for this purpose)

What do you think?

-FT

[jsonin]

Reasonable response.

Does CMS sign off on the schema?
Or is this a different play?

[ftrotter]

CMS has decided not to decide. According to their standard, it must be "machine readable". They specifically said that a pdf is not machine readable.

They did not specifically say so, but I think it can be further inferred that the HHS policy would be compliant with Project Open Data which does indicate that the underlying format standard should also be based on open standards.

Which really means that the choice is:

• XML which no one uses for data anymore, because JSON is better
• JSON which is a reasonable choice, but more fragile than CSV
• CSV comma delimited was what we chose for the specification.

-FT