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

Wed Nov 6 06:56:43 UTC 2013

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