[od-discuss] City of Calgary Open Data License Approval Request

Wed Mar 20 05:42:34 UTC 2013

On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com> wrote:
>
> Re the side-issue of "non-reusable" licenses -- if you look at the
> category on the opensource.org site, all of the licenses contain
> company/institution names. Many of them are "reusable" in the sense
> that of course the name can be replaced, but that does require editing
> the license, which has historically led to other changes, minor and
> major. Not mentioning an institution in the license text works just
> fine, so it's silly to create licenses that require copying and
> editing in order to make sensible use of. (Is this a correct summary?
> I dimly remembered a FAQ or other material explaining this on
> opensource.org but can't find. Luis? ;-))

We have a bunch of licenses that have a name that is specific to an
institution. (As you say, basically all of them). However, we no
longer accept licenses where the body itself makes specific reference
to an institution, except as the steward of the license. It must be
usable for other institutions/organizations/etc. without modification.

Luis