[od-discuss] Open Government License - Surrey 2.0

Wed Mar 18 17:27:45 UTC 2015

I’m +1 on the approach that Herb suggests.

BTW the FAQ on data.surrey.ca [1] seems OK to me: it points directly to the licence without any additional conditions and says that “licencees must, however, identify the source of the data on their derived products” (the attribution requirement). It does *not* say anything about the licence having to be applied to derivative products themselves.

Regards

Andrew

[1] http://data.surrey.ca/pages/faq

From: od-discuss [mailto:od-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Herb Lainchbury
Sent: 18 March 2015 16:10
To: od-discuss at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [od-discuss] Open Government License - Surrey 2.0

"I'm happy to do this if nobody else wishes to. I would need a contact."

It believe we're all in agreement that this is not a conformance issue.

It seems to me that insisting on clarification before a conformance test is going too far, when we're all in agreement that this is not a conformance issue.

We haven't asked publishers to provide their interpretation of their own license before as far as I know.  Doing so would set a new precedent which I think is beyond the scope of conformance testing.

My preference is to provide helpful feedback to the license publisher *after* our conformance vote, letting them know about the interpretation issue.

I think the key here is that Mike is highlighting something that the definition does not cover.  A licensors interpretation of a license they are using.  The Definition covers the license itself, and how that license is applied to a work, but not how a license is interpreted or perceived by a licensor. I can easily imagine a licensor mis-using any license, even Creative-Commons for example, and claiming that a consumer needs to pay an access fee or something even though that's not required by the license.  That doesn't make the license not open, it just means the licensor has decided to use the license in a way that renders the work not open.

If we're going to introduce a new process where we ask license publishers for their interpretation of the license they are using then let's discuss how that should happen, and what we would do with the feedback.

Even if we did ask Surrey for clarification.  What would we do with that feedback?  Would we judge the license as non-open?  On what basis?  We don't have a rule for that.

IMHO, it's not appropriate to ask Surrey for clarification before assessment.  This would be a standard we've never held any other publisher to.

Having said that, I also don't want to rush the process.  We started this several months ago.  Surrey was very responsive to us in addressing our written concerns, and I thought we were ready to move forward.  That may have been an error in judgement on my part.

So, if we're not ready to vote yet, I am fine with delaying.  Part of the consequence of vanity licenses is that they cause a lot of waste - for all parties.

I think going through this process has been useful nonetheless.

Herb

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