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

[Herb Lainchbury]

"2.2 Acceptable Conditions
The license shall not limit, make uncertain, or otherwise diminish the
permissions required in Section 2.1 except by the following allowable
conditions:"

I think the exemption in question makes it uncertain whether or not the
permissions are in fact granted.  And it does so in a way that is not one
of the Acceptable Ways.

While there may be other issues, this one seems fairly obvious to me and
would cause me to vote no.

BTW, this is not only an issue with the BC-derived licenses, other
provinces (Ontario, Alberta) have also forked the Canadian license in ways
that I think make it uncertain whether permissions are granted.

There are also examples of forks of the Canadian license that do not have
this issue.  The city of Winnipeg (
https://data.winnipeg.ca/open-data-licence ) and the Office of the
Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC (
https://www.oipc.bc.ca/media/15403/open-government-licence.pdf ) are two
such examples.

I am considering calling for a vote on this in the next few days.  Further
discussion is still welcome.



On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 1:45 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com>
wrote:

> 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
>



-- 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions
250.704.6154
http://www.dynamic-solutions.com
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