2013/3/14 Pierre Béland <[email protected]> > > [ ... ] This license is said to be derived from the United Kingdom > license which is said to be compatible with the ODbL (and thus OSM ). > > I would appreciate your comments on this. >
All right. You asked. :-) The governments, municipal, provincial and federal, who choose to create or modify an Open Data license are hurting Open Data. The first stab wound was the misguided Vancouver Open Data license and we have not yet stopped the bleeding. Modifying an Open Data license is similar to declaring that "in my municipality, we will use a modification of a standard electrical appliance plug and socket." The plug from a Waterloo Region toaster may be incompatible with an socket in Quebec City in obvious or subtle ways. Household appliances might move periodically when an owner moves, or when an appliance is sent as a gift. Open Data, by definition, is intended to be combined and compared and moved about, further and more often than a simple appliance. We've been clever enough to standardize our appliance plugs across the continent. It is important to standardize our Open Data licenses around the world. Governments. Use the Open Data licenses drafted and curated by the Open Data Commons at the Open Knowledge Foundation. You (governments) do not have the mandate from your citizens to spend their money to learn the things that you need to know about international data law that are required to draft a rational Open Data license. To do so in each municipality and province is a phenomenal waste of resources. And you don't have the mandate to consume resources to maintain that license once you draft it. International data law is new and evolving. You can't keep up.
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