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

Wed Nov 6 15:30:00 UTC 2013

Hi all, 

I thought I would chime in from my perspective working on Canada's OGL (and I'm cc'ing provincial colleagues). 

The template approach is exactly the approach we are intending to implement for Canadian governments. We developed the  -Canada, -BC,  -Alberta, and -Ontario together from a common template. We are currently working on adoption guidelines for Canadian jurisdictions which will state which parts of the generic template need to be changed to account for local legislation (and those are the only parts that can change). 

Canada is a federal system with multiple levels of Government and the legislation and management of copyright, FOI and privacy  (particularly Crown Copyright) are complex issues. Given this context, we all wanted to create a licence that was as open and as interoperable but met individual jurisdictional needs. We think that if a jurisdiction follows our guidelines, they come out the other end with an OD-conformant licence.  From this perspective, this is a reusable licence. Our modest aim is for the OGL to be taken up by all provinces/territories and municipalities in Canada. We're already up to 10 adopters and the list is growing. 

Our suggestion would be to have the template tested for conformance.

There's still some work to be done. Our next steps will be to finalize our adoption guidelines, post the generic template licence and then start looking at how we can improve the template (for example, how we've written the attribution section needs some attention, not for intent but for clarity). We're also looking at solutions for the issue Kent identifies around how we manage the licence itself, to ensure that adopters follow the guidelines. 

We're always interested in hearing your feedback.

--Mark

Mark Levene
Information Management | Gestion de l'information
Chief Information Officer Branch | Direction du dirigeant principal de l'information
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat | Secrétariat du Conseil du Trésor du Canada
Ottawa, Canada K1A 0R5

Mark.Levene at tbs-sct.gc.ca 
Telephone | Téléphone 613-952-5948 / Facsimile | Télécopieur 613-946-9893 / Teletypewriter | Téléimprimeur 613-957-9090
Government of Canada | Gouvernement du Canada

-----Original Message-----
From: od-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:od-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Kent Mewhort
Sent: November-06-13 1:57 AM
To: Mike Linksvayer; Paul Norman
Cc: od-discuss at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [od-discuss] Provincial and Game OGLs; Open Definition 2.0

On 13-11-06 01:37 AM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>
> 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.
I suppose there are two different levels of "non-reusable".  Strictly
speaking, only licenses that contain author-specific information AND
prohibit changing the license through an assertion of copyright in the
license text are entirely non-reusable.  However, I think the more
commonly used definition of non-reusable (eg. used by the OSI) more
broadly includes any license tied to a specific author.

I think templating licenses such as the OGL-Canada would be a good
approach.  This seems to be what the OSI has done with licenses such as
MIT and BSD, both of which technically started off as vanity licenses. 
If we approve a templated version, this would even encourage other
parties to use the templated version itself without making further
changes of their own (as they wouldn't have to go through the approval
process themselves).

One tricky issue to be careful with though is copyright in the license
text itself.  We'd need to get permission to template from the license
authors, ideally through them releasing the license text under an open
license.

Where licenses unnecessarily deviate from an approved template, I think
we should at least consider these being non-conformant, as Luis and Paul
have suggested. We want to make sure we're not actually encouraging
license proliferation by giving our stamp of approval to these licenses.

Kent

_______________________________________________
od-discuss mailing list
od-discuss at lists.okfn.org
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/od-discuss
Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/od-discuss