[od-discuss] OGL UK v3.0 decision time

Tue Oct 28 04:12:35 UTC 2014

On 10/26/2014 01:56 PM, Luis Villa wrote:
> I apologize that I have not had time to devote to ODC lately, and I
> apologize to the authors of the OGL for not providing this feedback at a
> time when it would have been more useful. Nevertheless, some comments:
> 
> *The good*
> +1. It appears to be compliant with version 2.0 of the Open Definition.
> 
> *The less good*
> This license is an extremely positive step forward when compared to
> previous versions of the OGL UK, and the authors are to be thanked and
> congratulated for their hard work. However, I feel the license still has
> drafting issues that I feel I should raise for the record and to educate
> future submitters to ODC. In particular, roughly from most important
> down to "very much drafting nitpicks":
> 
>  1. It retains a variety of jurisdiction-specific clauses that will
>     inevitably result in a new flood of confusing, customized,
>     likely-incompatible versions of the OGL.
>  2. Modern open licenses (GPL v3, MPL v2, CC 4, etc.) have realized that
>     automatic termination without an ability to remedy the termination
>     can be problematic. It would be good if OGL remedied this. (The
>     simplest version of the cure that I'm aware of is in copyleft-next,
>     Sec. 7(a)
>     <https://gitorious.org/copyleft-next/copyleft-next/source/3baab310f662811ba48d8a86bfe7f9ef7ef612dc:Drafts/copyleft-next>.)

Perhaps a question about termination and cure period should be added to
the info requested with submissions at
http://opendefinition.org/licenses/process/ in order to encourage
submitters to encourage this.

I don't know if it is important enough to do so, but in addition to
asking, could be made a requirement for being a "recommended" license;
right now recommended includes as a requirement "generally considered
best practice"; does automatic termination without cure put a license
irredeemably outside of current best practice? This would mean moving
ODbL 1.0 to "other" category.

>  3. The "About" section confusingly mixes legally non-impactful
>     commentary/explanation with language that is presumably intended to
>     be legally binding ("when the Information is adapted and licensed
>     under either of those licenses...") These should be separated out.
>  4. Is unnecessarily limited to public sector information ("Contains
>     public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence
>     v3.0.") which will be unnecessarily confusing when the database is
>     adapted by combination with non-public-sector databases.

It does everything it can to avoid this -- explicitly stating that
conditions are fulfilled when complying with CC-BY or ODC-BY -- use
short of not existing. :) Or maybe you mean the default attribution
line; I agree that will be kind of weird in some cases.

>  5. Does not number sections, which makes discussion of the license
>     cumbersome (though the authors are otherwise to be quite applauded
>     for the clarity of the drafting!)
> 
> As a result of #1, I would strongly urge that OKFN/ODC should state that
> usage of the license is disfavored unless absolutely necessary (e.g.,
> where usage is required by statute) in favor of jurisdiction-neutral
> licenses like CC 4.0.

It will go under "other" rather than "recommended" conformant licenses
on http://opendefinition.org/licenses/

The comment there for UK OGL 2.0 is "Non-reusable. For use by UK
government licensors; re-uses of OGL-UK-2.0 material may be released
under CC-BY or ODC-BY. Note version 1.0 is not approved as conformant."
I suspect the same will work for 3.0 when added, but stronger language
would be OK with me. Some others in the other category would need the
same language. Though the paragraph above the other table already has
"strongly advised" to use a recommended license.

Re #1, I have a more general nitpick: I wish the versioning had been
exploited as an opportunity to get other governments to converge on at
least an OGL template (of course I'd rather they converged on a reusable
OGL, or better yet converged on using CC-BY, or better yet CC0, or
better yet on all PSI not subject to copy/database restrictions...but
I'll accept tiny steps).

Mike