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

Wed Nov 6 21:39:15 UTC 2013

Thanks very much for this additional perspective. I suspect evaluating
conformance of the templated license, and with additional insight provided
by adoption guidelines, will be a good path forward.

I and doubtless others on the Open Definition Advisory Council would be
happy to provide feedback before these are finalized, if/as desired.

Mike

On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 7:30 AM, Levene, Mark <Mark.Levene at tbs-sct.gc.ca>wrote:

> 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
>
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