[od-discuss] Status of Vancouver and Surrey OGL varients

Wed Dec 10 08:18:39 UTC 2014

On 12/09/2014 11:52 PM, Paul Norman wrote:
> On 11/20/2014 1:45 PM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>>
>>     A bigger issue to me is that I've been told by governments using
>>     them that the OGL-BC derived licenses (OGL-Surrey, OGL-Vancouver)
>>     are not compatible with CC BY, ODC-BY or the ODbL. Because the
>>     Canadian OGL variants are essentially only usable by a single
>>     government, this leaves me with an impossible situation for making
>>     works from multiple sources and my work.
>>
>>
>> That's also extremely annoying but wouldn't make the licenses non-open
>> per the definition.
>>
> While I agree in principle that an open license need not be compatible
> with other open licenses, I am worried by licenses which are
> interoperable with neither CC or ODC licenses.
> 
> I am not sure that a non-reusable license which fails to be compatible
> with any other open licenses can be considered open. If I take Vancouver
> data, modify it and add my own copyrightable contributions, and want to
> release the new work, I cannot do so under any open license. Other open
> licenses are not compatible, and I cannot release it under the
> OGL-Vancouver license as I am not the City of Vancouver.* To my mind,
> this is non-open.

I'm very sympathetic to your argument, but we (whoever was participating
at time anyway, I haven't dug up discussion) decided to not address
compatibility in OD 2.0. The fallback was to require that a license be
compatible with at least one of CC-BY-SA, ODbL, or GPL in order to be
put in "recommended" category.

I've added https://github.com/okfn/opendefinition/issues/77 for 2.1 to
make sure this gets re-evaluated

> * There is an argument to be made that it is possible for an individual
> to release their own works under the OGL-Vancouver license, but to pick
> that license for your own creation would be questionable.

In any case I'm convinced for other reasons the OGL-BC derived licenses
are non-compliant even without considering compatibility.

Mike