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

Sun Nov 16 01:06:43 UTC 2014

"Should we be reviewing OGL-BC-2.0 first as parent of Surrey?"

I considered that, but AFAIK no one other than me has requested OGL-BC be
decided upon.  And, since Paul specifically requested Vancouver and Surrey
it seemed logical to discuss at least one of those.

I am not sure how important "parentage" is.  I view them as three different
sub-national licenses.  Similar, yes, but different.

While non-reusable licenses are clearly less desirable, if a jurisdiction
insists on forking from another jurisdiction then I would like to at least
encourage them to fork from an approved license.  Surrey and Vancouver
presumably could choose to fork the OGL-CA rather than the OGL-BC.  I
assume they are able to do this because Surrey only recently switched to
their custom license from the PDDL which they used for quite a while before
forking the OGL-BC-2.0.  And Kelowna, another jurisdiction in BC uses the
PDDL now.

I am also happy to continue with the BC discussion, but I think Surrey's is
just as valid as they are both sub-national and the most similar approved
license they are both based on is the OGL-CA.

"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 my opinion, Paul is correct that the OGL-CA can only be used by the
federal government publishers, which is why it is listed as non-reusable.

That's my understanding of the OGL-UK as well, though I admit, I don't know
enough about the government structure there to know if that's true.

In any case, I think it would be helpful to put at least one of these
OGL-CA forks through the process.

Herb

On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 3:08 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com>
wrote:

> 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
>
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