[od-discuss] compatibility should (was Re: Status of Vancouver and Surrey OGL varients)

[Aaron Wolf]

My inclination is to word it sort of like:

"The license should aim for compatibility with…"

and perhaps

"The license should avoid [extraneous] conditions that would create
incompatibilities with other Open licenses"

Basically, the point is something like "Any clause that creates
incompatibilities should require justification and careful consideration."

Essentially, "consider compatibility with other Open licenses as a high
priority, and do not carelessly introduce incompatible terms."

I hope some of this perspective and writing can be used / adapted into
this concern which I basically agree with.

Cheers,
Aaron

On 05/15/2015 12:24 PM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> On 12/10/2014 12:18 AM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>> On 12/09/2014 11:52 PM, Paul Norman wrote:
>>> On 11/20/2014 1:45 PM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>>>>
>>>>      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.
>>>>
>>> While I agree in principle that an open license need not be compatible
>>> with other open licenses, I am worried by licenses which are
>>> interoperable with neither CC or ODC licenses.
>>>
>>> I am not sure that a non-reusable license which fails to be compatible
>>> with any other open licenses can be considered open. If I take Vancouver
>>> data, modify it and add my own copyrightable contributions, and want to
>>> release the new work, I cannot do so under any open license. Other open
>>> licenses are not compatible, and I cannot release it under the
>>> OGL-Vancouver license as I am not the City of Vancouver.* To my mind,
>>> this is non-open.
>>
>> I'm very sympathetic to your argument, but we (whoever was participating
>> at time anyway, I haven't dug up discussion) decided to not address
>> compatibility in OD 2.0. The fallback was to require that a license be
>> compatible with at least one of CC-BY-SA, ODbL, or GPL in order to be
>> put in "recommended" category.
>>
>> I've added https://github.com/okfn/opendefinition/issues/77 for 2.1 to
>> make sure this gets re-evaluated
> 
> I've created a pull request addressing this, rationale below for
> discussion, copied from https://github.com/okfn/opendefinition/pull/103
> 
> I continue to think compatibility an important issue and that the
> definition is by far the most powerful venue this group has, so should
> (heh) be mentioned there.
> 
> We have other *should*s in the definition, this one is as important.
> 
> I've kept this very brief:
> 
>> The **license** *should* be compatible with other open licenses.
> 
> Some obvious ways to extend:
> 
>> The **license** *should* be compatible with other open licenses to the
> maximum extent possible given its policy ends.
> 
> or
> 
>> The **license** *should* be compatible with other open licenses, in
> particular one or more of the most commonly used copyleft licenses.
> 
> However I tend to think generality is good here, message should not
> prompt thinking of excuses (which ...policy ends... does) nor narrowness
> (which ...copyleft licenses does).
> 
> Mike
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-- 
Aaron Wolf
co-founder, Snowdrift.coop
music teacher, wolftune.com