[od-discuss] OGL-Alberta v2.0 and OGL-BC v2.0 conformance decision time

Sun Jul 14 21:55:37 UTC 2013

On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 9:18 AM, Andrew Stott
<andrew.stott at dirdigeng.com> wrote:
> I'm broadly with Kent.

Thanks to Kent for the analysis, which points to a possible important
difference between BC and Alberta. If anyone wants to +1/-1 them
separately, please do.

> The UK OGL 2.0 has an exemption for "information that has neither been
> published nor disclosed under information access legislation (including the
> Freedom of Information Acts for the UK and Scotland) by or with the consent
> of the Information Provider;".  As far as I can see the policy intent is to
> exempt from the licence information which has been leaked or stolen.  It is
> important to have the neither-nor construct because as a matter of policy
> the UK has published information which had previously been refused under the
> FOI Act, and in addition information which has been published is not
> actually accessible under the UK-FOI.  Moreover the UK needs a broad
> reference to "information access legislation" since there are rights to
> information under not only the FOI Act but also under the Environmental
> Protection Regulations and other legislation.
>
> I'm not happy with the Alberta version because it could exclude published
> information if that information was not accessible under applicable laws;
> that makes it more difficult for users to establish that they have Open
> rights to published information.  It would be better to use the UK
> neither-nor of publication and accessibility.

This seems to put users in a bad spot, perhaps not quite as bad as the
 "misleading" term thankfully stricken from UK OGL 2.0, but precisely
not the sort of thing to desire from a public license, which is
clarity of copyright permission. I'm *leaning* toward -1 on both
Alberta and BC at this point, but would be happy to hear further
arguments either way.

Mike