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

[Paul Norman]

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

From: mlinksva at gmail.com [mailto:mlinksva at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Mike
Linksvayer
Sent: Monday, November 04, 2013 8:05 PM
To: Paul Norman
Cc: od-discuss at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [od-discuss] Provincial and Game OGLs; Open Definition 2.0

 

I took a quick look, and all 3 say

 

"The Open Government Licence - X is based on version 2.0 of the Open
Government Licence - British Columbia, which was developed through public
consultation and collaborative efforts by the provincial and federal
government. The only substantive change to the licence is references to the
Province of British Columbia are replaced with the City of X."

 

where X is name of city. Is this definitely the case? I have not done a diff
to verify.

 

I don't think it makes sense to submit each formally right now, but many
thanks for highlighting the existence of these licenses. Definitely a use
case to consider for OD 2.0.

 

So nobody else has to say the unpleasant thing: these appear to be "vanity"
licenses. Every government body (why stop at municipality?) having a named
license can't be anything but painful for users. But, they are probably
open. Are vanity licenses really needed to goad each level of government to
release data under open terms?

 

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