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

Sat Nov 15 23:08:05 UTC 2014

On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 2:44 PM, Herb Lainchbury
<herb at dynamic-solutions.com> wrote:
> Now that we have released OD 2.0 I think we can proceed with looking at
> these licences for conformance.
>
> Because it's easiest to reference, I propose we start with the
> OGL-Surrey-1.0.
>
> Paul submitted this license as well as Vancouver some time ago and we
> decided to wait until 2.0 was finished.  The licenses are similar but I
> would suggest we work on them one at a time to make discussion simpler and
> then the second discussion (Vancouver) will likely benefit from the first.
>
> Open Government License - Surrey - version 1.0:
> http://data.surrey.ca/pages/open-government-licence-surrey
>
> The Surrey License is based on the OGL-BC-2.0 which is in turn based on
> OGL-Canada-2.0.  The OGL-Canada-2.0 license is OD-conformant.

Should we be reviewing OGL-BC-2.0 first as parent of Surrey? I know we
discussed it extensively a long time ago but dimly recall any further
decision on it was pending OD 2.0 also.

> 1.  State the rationale for the new license.
>
> This is a license based upon the OGL-BC which is a jurisdiction specific
> license.  The OGL-BC itself is based upon the OGL-Canada-2.0, which itself
> is jurisdiction specific.  Because OGL-Canada is jurisdiction specific it
> prevents reuse in it's current form.

I admit, again, that I didn't understand at the time of approval that
OGL-Canada could *only* be used by the federal government. Also see
https://github.com/okfn/opendefinition/pull/67 which I left to you. :)

I think if I had understood that I might have proposed only approving
OGL-Canada if assigned to some new sub-basement of "other" approved
licenses, not only non-reusable a la OGL UK, but non-reusable by other
levels of government. And while they're presumably compliant,
provincial and then municipal levels of licenses each with minor
changes...just ridiculous! I'm not certain what to do with this
feeling, so I'll sit back, let others discuss, and probably
irresponsibly abstain from the eventual approval vote.

Mike