Hi! I’m Taiwan’s Digital Minister and I’d like to ask if it’s possible to add Taiwan’s OGDL to Conformant Licenses - Open Definition - Defining Open in Open Data, Open Content and Open Knowledge ?
1. Link to the full text of the license
The official English translation is provided in the latter part of the webpage.
2. Rationale for the “Open Government Data License Taiwan”
The main purpose for finalizing the “Open Government Data License Taiwan” is to introduce a general public license that can be adopted easily by most of the Taiwan government agencies, for it is provided by the government itself that shall ease the uncertainties in a leverage, and is also conformant with the principles laid out in the Open Definition.
Under the “Open Government Data License Taiwan”, the Data Providing Organization grants every User a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free copyright license to make use of the provided data for any purpose without copyright restrictions.
3. Explanation about how the license may be used
The licensors defined in the “Open Government Data License Taiwan” are actually not limited to the Taiwan government agencies, and the license provided under the “Open Government Data License Taiwan” is clearly stated to be sublicensable, theoretically, the licensees can relay the license they have under the same “Open Government Data License Taiwan” in the subsequent use to others.
However, the title of the License has been inherent in the word as “Government Data”, in practice this License might just be deemed specific to the jurisdiction of Taiwan or that can only be used by the Taiwan government agencies as data providers.
Due to the facilitating purpose to the Taiwan government agencies, the title “Government Data” shall be remained, and if the forum to be held by the Open Definition Advisory Council is going to categorize the “Open Government Data License Taiwan” as “non-reusable” because of the title, it shall be understandable and acceptable.
4. Compare and contrast to the most similar approved as OD-conformant licenses.
Open Government Licence United Kingdom 2.0 and 3.0 are the most similar approved licenses to the “Open Government Data License Taiwan”. The crucial point is that although there have been the choice of law clause and government title introduced and presented in the License, yet it is also embedded a one-way transition clause that allows users apply all the data provided originally under the “Open Government Data License Taiwan” in the way that permits by the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International hereafter.
5. Explain the benefit the new license brings over already approved OD-conformant licenses which would outweigh the costs of license proliferation?
The direct and notable benefit of the “Open Government Data License Taiwan” is to make the data released by the Taiwan governmental agencies in a reliable way conformant to the Open Definition.
Before the “Open Government Data License Taiwan” is finalized, quite a number of Taiwan governmental agencies were providing the data in a non-transferable and revocable way because that’s the traditional method that the agencies are familiar with.
Civic groups in Taiwan that promote Open Data tried to introduce and persuade the agencies to apply other already approved OD-conformant licenses such as Creative Commons Licenses in CC BY or CC BY-SA, yet the progress is not efficient and the achievement is varied with different officials in charge among central and local governments and even make the license proliferation a situation that has to be managed just between central and local governments in Taiwan.
The “Open Government Data License Taiwan” has a merit in easing this situation, it helps to make the central government and local government in Taiwan to apply for an unified general public license and also facilitates the users can apply CC BY 4.0 license to these provided data when necessary. Under the “Open Government Data License Taiwan”, most of the data projects provided in data.gov.tw can be used under CC BY 4.0, Such as the 20-year ongoing “CNS 11643 Chinese Standard Interchange Code Project” that helps people to type rare Chinese characters, has been released under the “Open Government Data License Taiwan” and now be submitted upstream to the Debian/Ubuntu Linux repository.
The Debian Linux community has recognized that the CNS 11643 project can be applied under CC BY 4.0 on the one-way transition clause of the “Open Government Data License Taiwan”: 98.1+20150923-2 : fonts-cns11643 package : Ubuntu
6. Identify which recommended conformant licenses the new license is compatible with, and how?
The “Open Government Data License Taiwan” is compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International on a one-way transition clause predefined. The precise wording for this mechanism is listed below:
“The License is compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International. This means that when the Open Data is provided under the License, User automatically satisfies the conditions of this License when he/she makes use of the Open Data in compliance with the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International thereafter.”
7. Provide a link to any public drafting process for the license.
https://g0v.hackpad.com/ep/pad/static/Taiwan_open_government_data_license_citizens_community_version
The drafting of the “Open Government Data License Taiwan” was initially a collaboration project launched in December 2014 as one of the g0v - civic hacking activities. The discussion and revision of the draft can be observed and studied by the hackpad page listed above.
Then it is introduced to the officials in charge of the National Development Council and be moderated by a Minister without Portfolio of Executive Yuan and finally published in July 2015 on the official data portal of Taiwan - data.gov.tw.
I also discussed this briefly in person with 
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