Stream: implementers
Topic: Copying the FHIR spec
Michael Calderero (May 16 2019 at 10:38):
Our FHIR server implementation will be undergoing internal validation.
One of questions that came up from QA was about the requirements from which we based the implementation of our FHIR server. Ideally I would point them to the FHIR spec page, but some parts of the FHIR specification have a bit of uncertainty (e.g. the server SHALL do this...it MAY do this as well). It was decided that the approach would be to make a copy of the FHIR spec in e.g. Word, then comment out the uncertain parts or parts where we did not implement, and make that as the requirements documentation for the project.
My question: are there any copyright restrictions or other restrictions with outright copying of the FHIR specification and modifying the text to fit what has been implemented?
Grahame Grieve (May 16 2019 at 12:21):
you should not make a copy of the spec. You can, under the IP rules - the copyright doesn't stop you from doing that. The trademark use rules mean that you would have to make it clear that your copy of the spec is a tampered copy, and you'd have to remove "fhir" and the logo from the tampered copy, except inasmuch as you use it to refer to the base specification
but in fact, that's the hint towards the right solution - you should make an implementation guide that says 'this is the rules for our server' and otherwise passes through references to the main spec. You could do this just by editing html somehow or you can use the formal IG tooling we provide, which is more work up front, but makes it a lot easier to do things you might get to later
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
