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

Tue Nov 12 07:33:48 UTC 2013

I should clarify that when I originally brought up templating, I was
thinking along the lines of the OSI's templating of the BSD license (see
http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause).  The template works by
dropping in the licensor's name, and not much else.  I can imagine that
changing a choice of law/forum clause, and perhaps one or two other
minor tweaks along these lines, would also work with the license still
being essentially the same and interoperable with other licenses from
the same template.

However, this is not what's happened so far with the OGL-C license. 
Even with the change of a few clauses, the BC OGL, for example, is a
/very /different creature than the OGL-C.  For the templating approach
to work, I think the policy of using the template would need to leave
little leeway to change the template or add additional clauses. 
Otherwise, you end up with entirely different licenses, not different
instances of the same license.

Kent

<http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause>On 13-11-12 12:11 AM, Luis
Villa wrote:
>
> 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
> <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto:Mark.Levene at tbs-sct.gc.ca>
>         Telephone | Téléphone 613-952-5948 <tel:613-952-5948> /
>         Facsimile | Télécopieur 613-946-9893 <tel:613-946-9893> /
>         Teletypewriter | Téléimprimeur 613-957-9090 <tel: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>
>         [mailto: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 <mailto: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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