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

Thu Nov 20 08:26:12 UTC 2014

I will start off this discussion, with what I think is the main issue with
the OGL-Surrey-1.0 license
<http://data.surrey.ca/pages/open-government-licence-surrey>, which is one
of the statements in the Exemptions section.
Namely:

This license does not grant you any right to use:
* Information or Records not accessible under the Freedom of Information
and Protection of Privacy Act (B.C.);

The basic problem that I see with this exemption is that if this license is
applied to a work, I have no idea if the license applies without consulting
and understanding the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act
(B.C.) and figuring out if the work I want to access is or is not
accessible under this Act.

While I am not sure if the license itself is open or not at this point - I
would certainly find it difficult to determine if it applied to any given
work - even if posted right beside that work.

Thoughts?

H

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.
>
> To make sure we follow our own process I have completed the questionnaire
> for Surrey's license as follows.
>
> Please have a look at the license and discuss as needed.  I am not calling
> for a vote at this time.  I will do that once we have had chance to discuss.
>
> Herb
>
>
> =================================================================================================
> OGL-Surrey-1.0
>
> 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.
>
>
> 2.  Explain whether the license may be used by any licensor, or is
> specific to an organization/place/jurisdiction. We generally frown on the
> latter (see proliferation below), only making politically expedient
> exceptions (eg. the organization is a national government; and these are
> categorized as “non-reusable”).
>
> Like the licenses it is based on, the licence is jurisdiction specific and
> contains some specific exceptions and definitions for this purpose.
>
>
> 3.  Compare and contrast to the most similar approved as OD-conformant
> licenses.
>
> The OGL-Surrey is a derivative of the OGL-Canada-2.0, an approved as
> OD-conformant license.  The principle differences between this license and
> the OGL-Canada are the references to the name of the jurisdiction,
> references to jurisdiction specific legislation and the addition of an
> exemption.  There are several other minor word and punctuation changes.
>
>
> 4.  Explain the benefit the new license brings over already approved
> OD-conformant licenses which would outweigh the costs of license
> proliferation? (Link is re software licenses, but the same principles and
> costs apply.)
>
> The license does not appear to add additional benefit beyond what the
> OGL-Canada provides other than the fact that the OGL-Canada is not reusable
> because of the jurisdiction specific language.  Ideally, a future version
> of the OGL-Canada would be developed that would remove this barrier to
> reuse, but at the present time sub-national jurisdictions wishing to base
> their license on OGL-Canada have to make modifications.
>
>
> 5.  Identify which recommended conformant licenses the new license is
> compatible with, and how – by alignment (permissions identical or a
> superset of existing license, conditions identical or a subset) and/or
> express permission to license the original and/or adaptations of the
> licensed work under an existing license.
>
> This license contains notice and attribution obligations so might be
> compatible with CC-BY, ODC-By and ODC-ODbL but is definitely not compatible
> with ODC-PDDL (i.e. by using data published under the Surrey license you
> are not able to republish under PDDL).
>
>
> 6. Provide a link to any public drafting process (e.g., conducted on a
> public communication forum of some sort; multiple drafts presented to that
> forum) for the license.
>
> To my knowledge there was no public drafting process for this license.
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 7:02 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 07/22/2014 02:46 PM, Paul Norman wrote:
>> > Some time ago I sent the Vancouver and Surrey OGL licenses to the list
>> > to see if they were Open Definition conformant or not and secondarily to
>> > have the AC declare it as conformant or non-comformant.
>> >
>> > I'm wondering what the status of these is. Currently a similar vanity
>> > license, the OGL-Canada-2.0 has been listed, but these ones haven't.
>>
>> IIRC we're waiting til Open Definition 2.0 is finished to reopen
>> subnational Canadian licenses.
>>
>> When we do we need to decide how to address the many of them. In
>> December 2013 there was a thread about possibility of treating them all
>> as one templated license, with some indication that was the intention of
>> the licenses, and some skepticism about that being a good idea and
>> whether there was not already variation from a latent template among the
>> licenses that existed at the time.
>>
>> Mike
>>
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>
>
>
>
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