[od-discuss] Open Government License - Surrey 2.0
Peter Murray-Rust
pm286 at cam.ac.uk
Sun Mar 15 07:39:04 UTC 2015
On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 1:31 AM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com>
wrote:
> That's a reasonable summary, with these caveats:
> * I have reservations, not sure if anyone else does.
> * My reservations would go away if license steward/only possible
> licensor explained that they are not confused.
>
We agree your problem is not with the licence in an abstract context, but
how Surrey will implement it. I note that confusion over licences is
widespread - in my own field of scholarly communications there are many
licensors who are confused about how to operate CC licences - often by
adding additional restrictions or assuming that for example they affect
issues such as patents . This does not invalidate the licence, but the
application of the licence
* The precedent I want us to set is of careful deliberation -- we should
> never approve a license til it is time -- and to me the license
> steward/only possible licensor being confused is a red flag that it is
> not yet time. I may well be overreacting.
>
Let's take a hypothetical - that another Canadian county (cal it Wessex)
want to use the Surrey licence, take it and change "Surrey" to "Wessex"
throughout. And let's say MikeL knows the Wessex government and they
totally understand the licence and have documented their procedures so it's
clear that it will be operated correctly. We'd say "yes". Indeed we may
come to the stage where if we were asked about this by Mercia and Middlesex
and ... we'd see this as a template for all Canadian counties and we'd
create a "Generic Canadian county licence".
It may turn out that Surrey implements this in a way that we don't approve
of. We keep a watch on that and comment re-actively. Ultimately it will be
the courts of Canada which decide. For example, Germany has debated
"non-commercial" and a court decison last year that prevented teaching has
been overturned by a higher court.
For me the test is "is the abstract licence consistent and workable as it
is written". Our procedure - of requesting changes and getting the
requested changes - even if minimally compliant - suggest that it is.
P.
Mike
>
> On 03/14/2015 03:37 PM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> > To summarise so far as I understand it
> >
> > We've asked them for changes. They've made enough changes to be
> > conformant, but we have reservations, not strictly because of the
> > licence, but the licensor's process and understanding.
> >
> > Is that correct?
> >
> > The problem we face is that any decision we make is effectively our case
> > law and binds us for the future to some extent. Logically it seems we
> > should accept the licence, but we have reservations. If a less confused
> > licensor created effectively the same licence we might feel it was
> > satisfactory. ???
> >
> > P.
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 10:00 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com
> > <mailto:ml at gondwanaland.com>> wrote:
> >
> > -1
> >
> > Obviously per the text it is open. But I do not believe it is
> time[1] to
> > approve when the license steward and only possible licensor is
> > apparently confused about the license.
> >
> > I fully expect to be outvoted, and acknowledge that I should have
> > replied to previous thread pre-call.
> >
> > Mike
> >
> > [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSs6DcA6dFI
> >
> >
> >
> > On 03/14/2015 01:54 PM, Herb Lainchbury wrote:
> > > I believe we've discussed the OGL Surrey v2.0 sufficiently to
> assess
> > > conformance.
> > >
> > > In summary, we found the Open Government License - Surrey 1.0 to be
> > > non-conformant and sent a formal notice to the City of Surrey
> > making one
> > > specific recommendation and two suggestions. Within a few days
> they
> > > released a new version of their license adopting our
> > recommendation and
> > > incorporating one of our two suggestions. The suggestion that they
> > > didn't incorporate, which we said was not strictly required for
> > > conformance, is making their license re-usable by others.
> > >
> > > In our subsequent discussion there were comments about advice given
> > > concerning the license and whether or not that advice should be
> > > considered as part of the conformance process. I believe we have
> > > settled on the idea that we have to assess the license based on
> > what is
> > > written in it.
> > >
> > >
> > > I now request that advisory council members indicate whether they
> > agree
> > > that the license conforms to section 2 of the open definition
> (v2.0)
> > > found here:
> > >
> > > http://opendefinition.org/od/
> > >
> > >
> > > Please use +1 for agree and -1 for disagree.
> > >
> > >
> > > You can find a discussion here:
> > >
> https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/od-discuss/2015-February/001278.html
> > >
> > > and here:
> > > https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/od-discuss/2015-March/001293.html
> > >
> > >
> > > You can find the text for the license here:
> > >
> > > OGL Surrey v2.0
> > > http://data.surrey.ca/pages/open-government-licence-surrey
> > >
> > >
> > > We will continue counting votes for two weeks from now or until
> > > consensus is reached, which ever is first.
> > >
> > > Herb
> > >
> > >
> > >
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> >
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> >
> >
> > --
> > Peter Murray-Rust
> > Reader in Molecular Informatics
> > Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> > University of Cambridge
> > CB2 1EW, UK
> > +44-1223-763069
>
>
--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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