Maintenance and future of the Open Data Commons licences

Open Definition
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For public sector information (PSI), it seems that the OKI has now resolved this discussion in favor of CC‑BY‑4.0 if attribution is required and CC0‑1.0 otherwise. Indeed, ODC‑By‑1.0 and ODbL‑1.0 are now implicitly deprecated in this domain. Provocative, I know, so here is my source: Lämmerhirt (2017).

There are nonetheless quite a few problems with Lämmerhirt (2017) which the OKI might like to consider fixing and reissuing. Major shortcomings:

  • deprecation of Open Data Commons licenses in the context of government licensing policy should be stated explicitly
  • no detailed treatment on common license compatibilities, particularly between the ODC and CC families (leading one to suspect no such analysis exists)
  • the paragraph on permissive and copyleft licensing is simply incorrect

Minor issues:

  • no such thing as “civic law” (should be civil law?)
  • graphic 1 shows a previously unknown CC‑SA license, moreover license versions should be stated as version-agnostic interoperabilities do not exist
  • license annotation on graphic 2 is confusing and potentially ambiguous (I did eventually work out what “CC BY/SA 4.0” meant)
  • section on misuse of data provisions is useful but some remarks are wayward, for instance US fair use is intentionally framed to provide discretion by courts
  • full references should be given and shortened URLs especially should be avoided for reasons of information and linkrot (as per Wikipedia guidelines)
  • the term public sector information should be preferred over government information as the former is broader in scope

I suspect that problems in determining cross-license compatibilities — should these even exist — have ultimately led to the Creative Commons family becoming dominant outside of legacy usage. That, in my view, is a good outcome for open data.

Happy to answer questions or provide further background.

References

Lämmerhirt, Danny (December 2017). Avoiding data use silos: how governments can simplify the open licensing landscape. Open Knowledge International. Cambridge, United Kingdom.

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