[od-discuss] Provincial and Game OGLs; Open Definition 2.0

Tue Nov 5 23:37:20 GMT 2013

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 10:21 PM, Paul Norman <penorman at mac.com> wrote:

> What’s irritating to me is that there’s no reason they need to use vanity
> licenses with each province, they could simply adopt the definition for
> “Information Provider” from the UK OGL: “the person or organisation
> providing the Information under this licence” and then all use the OGL –
> BC.
>
>
>
> I’m coming at this from the approach of a user who cares about the
> license, so I need to analyze each license to see if I can use it. This
> analysis is pretty easy if that’s all they’ve changed and I’ve already
> looked at the BC license, but I’d still need to run a word diff to check
> that that’s really all they’ve changed.
>

Exactly.

> I’ll go a bit farther on them being vanity licenses. All three, the BC
> license, and the federal license are vanity licenses to the same extent.
> None of them can be applied to data from other governments within Canada.
> This doesn’t appear to of blocked OGL-Canada-2.0 from being listed as
> conformant.
>

I have to admit that I did not understand at the time that OGL-Canada-2.0
could only be used by the federal government; perhaps I should have
understood and been aware of the many subunit licenses waiting in the
wings, but I didn't and wasn't.

By the way,

> Should is stop them from being conformant? I don’t know, but I think the
> same standard needs to apply to all five, being released at the same time.
>

The same standard should apply conceptually, but I think we may want to
revisit them all after we have agreement on OD 2.0 and any process changes.
For example, we could choose to treat OGL BC as a template license, and say
anything that merely replaces the name is open; up to users of the
eventually hundreds of licenses from that template to verify statement
about no other changes is true or not.

I also realize now that UK OGL 2.0 isn't completely non-reusable. No non-UK
government unit is probably going to want to use it, but they could. It is
non-reusable in its branding, not conceptually.

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 8:26 PM, Herb Lainchbury <herb at dynamic-solutions.com>
 wrote:

> I think we have to treat the AB and BC licenses separately, because they
> are quite different.
>
> I am fine with delaying the decision on BC until we get 2.0 done, because
> I think it's going to make things clearer.  I'm not convinced that AB needs
> to wait but I'm not opposed either.
>

I just looked at both again, and again I'm not sure they are substantively
different.

    Information or Records not accessible under the Freedom of
Information and Protection of Privacy Act (B.C.);

    Information or Records that are not accessible under applicable laws

I understand that general "under applicable laws" is preferable, but is
this difference not muted by Information and Records being defined in terms
of specific laws in both?

Feels like splitting hairs. Net is, I'd prefer to just wait on conformance
votes for all vanity licenses until we have OD 2.0.

> By the way, the Ontario license was published as well.  As far as I know
> we haven't been asked to approve it, but it's much like the BC license.
> https://www.ontario.ca/government/open-government-licence-ontario
>

 Great...

Mike
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