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

Mon Nov 11 22:11:25 UTC 2013

I would be happy to discuss and review the template, but I admit to some
skepticism. This sounds very similar to the approach that CC has learned,
after a decade of licensee and licensor confusion, to avoid, albeit in only
one (two?) language and one federal jurisdiction.

Critically: how do you get both interoperability and meaningful
per-jurisdiction customizations? I strongly suspect that, unless the
customizations are of the form "some non-copyright rights are disclaimed
and may or may not apply" then the licenses will not actually be
meaningfully interoperable; and if the customizations are of that form,
then a blanket disclaimer of non-copyright rights would be sufficient.

I am open to persuasion, of course.

Apologies for responding briefly here, but thought this merited at least
some response and I am not able to respond in more detail at this time.

Luis
On Nov 6, 2013 1:49 PM, "Mike Linksvayer" <ml at gondwanaland.com> wrote:

> 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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