[od-discuss] Submitting a License to be Reviewed

Mon Aug 10 04:18:21 UTC 2015

Hello all,

I am submitting a license to be reviewed for conformance against the Open Definition. The license I am asking to review is the Korea Open Government License (KOGL), and you can find "Use Terms Guide for KOGL" at (in PDF): http://bit.ly/KOGL-EN

The information required by the license approval process is as follows:

1. The Rationale for the New License
The KOGL has been developed by the South Korean government (more precisely by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism) to allow citizens' free use of public works without individual permission, promoting and facilitating the use and the reuse of public works.

2. A Non-reusable License
Similar to the other conformant open government licenses, the KOGL can also be used only by government institutions, local governments, and public institutions in the Republic of Korea.

3. Comparison to the Conformant and Non-conformant CC Licenses
Since the KOGL has been modeled after the Creative Commons (CC) licenses, there are four different types of licenses in the KOGL, and they are similar to CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-ND, and CC-BY-NC-ND licenses, respectively. But, the KOGL Type 1, which is similar to CC-BY, is the only one recommened by the government to use. All the other types are not conformant the Open Definition, so they can be listed in the Non-Conformant Licenses page.

4. The Benefits of the KOGL
Even though the KOGL is non-resuable, it's supported by the law – Official Information Disclosure Act – in the Republic of Korea so that a lot of government institutions, local governments, and public institutions in Korea are encouraged to release their works under the KOGL. This move will be beneficial to Korean citizens, and this will further promote the importance of openness in Korea, contributing to the global OPEN community.

5. Compatibility with the CC-BY License
As I noted before, the KOGL Type 1 is based on the Creative Commons Attribution license. However, the KOGL Type 1 has some explicit restructions on prohibited use of information protected by other laws. For example, even though the work is released under the KOGL Type 1, personal and credit information, and military secrets can not be used or re-used by others. I think those restrictions make the KOGL Type 1 a subset of the CC-BY license.

6. The KOGL Website
As far as I know, there is no public drafting process for the license, but after the government announced the KOGL, the new Website (http://www.kogl.or.kr/ in Korean) introducing the KOGL opened. You can find some Q&A boards on the site.

I hope the KOGL Type 1 would be classified as conformant with the Open Definition. Since information related to the KOGL is mainly in Korean, it could be a little bit hard to review, but should there be anything I can help, please let me know.

Thank you for your time.

Best wishes,
James