On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Pierre Béland <pierz...@yahoo.fr> wrote: > Eh good news for OSM-Quebec community then. Let's wait for the official > confirmation of the exact license adopted.
I disagree. Any license drafted or adopted by a Canadian government, other than a no-restrictions, equivalent-to-Public-Domain-license, like ODC-PDDL, will require a waiver or clarification from the municipality (or province / territory, or feds) that attribution as provided by OpenStreetMap (wiki page, probably listed on a sub-page) meets their interpretation of "attribution". So, adoption of CC-anything-but-0 is bad for local OSM communities. It would likely work out okay in the end for those local OpenStreetMap communities. To my knowledge, every municipality approached for such a waiver has granted it. To OpenStreetMap Foundation at least. For the Open Data community at large, and for the municipality / governement itself, adoption of any restricting license is a disaster. For one thing, not every potential open project will be on the radar of a municipality in the same way that OpenStreetMap is. Too bad for that potential Open Data Project. Perhaps they'll get the waiver they need, perhaps they won't. Again, any government open data publication in Canada must be licensed ODC-PDDL, or else it is a not-open-enough-closed-data-failure. Another sign of bizarre, Open-blindness. I've had government open data representatives say to me, the equivalent of, "So what if the license says something complicated. It's open, just do what you want. We won't go after anybody who breaks the license. We just need to be able to shut down anybody who embarrasses us." Ahem. No. 0) If you plan to grant wavers and exemptions anyway, why not just use an unrestricted license? Oh, did you want to only grant exemptions for projects / persons of whom you approve? That doesn't sound very open. 1) If you don't plan to enforce your license terms, why select (or worse, why draft) a license with restrictions? Select ODC-PDDL instead. 2) If you want developers to work with your data, do you want developers who care enough to read, understand and follow your terms, or not? Because your license with restrictions just cut out a portion of those developers. You can still keep the developers that don't read licenses, or don't care about the terms. Congratulations. 3) What, you want to shut down a use of the data that embarrasses you? No. It doesn't work that way. If Open Data can be shown to expose that your mayor is a pathologically lying, bullying, drug addict with possible links to organized crime, you don't get to shut down the analysis just because your boss finds it embarrassing. (It's just a hypothetical example) 4) If you really do plan to grant a waiver or exemption to every project / user who asks for it, shouldn't you have selected an unrestricted Open Data License that didn't place the burden of that extra waiver step upon you (and each potential user) ? _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list Talk-ca@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca