[od-discuss] Open Definition Telecon 15:00 UTC Thursday 2014-06-12

Sun Jun 8 20:40:48 UTC 2014

I added one thing to the agenda, a proposed update of approval
process, which results in updated license categories, both of which
stem from moving some bits intended to address interoperability out of
the 2.0 draft. Changes/explanation in
https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/od-discuss/2014-April/000841.html

There's one part of Andrew Katz's
https://github.com/okfn/opendefinition/pull/39 I wanted to point out
before the call:

    + The conditions *must* not seek to derogate from rights such as
fair use and fair dealing, or from uses for which no licence is
required at law.

I'm not sure this is a good addition. I think we've discussed this
before, but not sure if it was on-list or -call, and can't find now:
what matters for "open", the lack of certain restrictions, or their
source? If the former, it shouldn't matter whether a restriction
exists because a license adds them (or tries to), or they exist by
default. I tend to think the source shouldn't matter: a "license" can
try to "impose" conditions by "contract" and still be "open" so long
as those conditions are permissible restrictions, nevermind what users
may or may not be free to do in various jurisdictions.

But, if we do go ahead with this addition , we need to take it
seriously and either move ODbL to non-open status or somehow come to
the conclusion that its attempted contractual layer is totally
ineffective (which I'm happy to believe) and state that in explanation
of how it complies.

Mike