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

Thu Nov 20 21:45:28 UTC 2014

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 12:40 AM, Paul Norman <penorman at mac.com> wrote:

>  On 11/20/2014 12:26 AM, Herb Lainchbury wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> FIPPA has two relevant classes of information - what must not be shared,
> and what may be shared, but doesn't have to be. It's not obvious which
> class of information the license refers to. I believe it's the former.
>
> My solution to this issue has been to ask the government releasing the
> dataset if what I wanted was accessible under the FIPPA act, to which
> they've always answered yes. In case of a no or a non-answer, I'd have to
> FOI the information I needed, showing that it was accessible.
>
> The above is a stupid process to have to go through to establish FIPPA
> accessibility.
>

Hmm, I said I would listen and probably abstain, but I'm switching to the
BC-derived licenses are non-open and I will vote no if they come up for a
vote. If the licenses by themselves aren't enough to allow any user to make
any use, they aren't open.

> 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.

Mike
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