About opendata and licenses

[Karl Dubost]

Seen this blog post today challenging the nature of *open* in the data released in the big canadian cities

On Tue, 27 Jul 2010 05:06:12 GMT
In Zzzoot: It's not Open Data, so stop calling it that...
At http://zzzoot.blogspot.com/2010/07/its-not-open-data-so-stop-calling-it.html

Tuesday, July 27, 2010
It's not Open Data, so stop calling it that...

While it is a great positive change that data is
being released through numerous efforts around the
world, data release is not the same as Open Data
release. A number of Canadian cities have
announced Open Data initiatives, but they are not
releasing Open Data. They are just releasing data.
Of course, this is better than not releasing data.
But let's at least be honest about what we are
doing.

Why aren't they Open Data? Because their licenses
are not Open Data licenses:

    Not Open Data: Edmonton: "The City may, in its
sole discretion, cancel or suspend your access to
the datasets without notice and for any reason..."
- from Terms of Use
    Not Open Data: Vancouver: "The City may, in
its sole discretion, cancel or suspend your access
to the datasets without notice and for any
reason..." - Terms of Use
    Not Open Data: Ottawa: "The City may, in its
sole discretion, cancel or suspend your access to
the datasets without notice and for any reason..."
- from Terms of Use
    Not Open Data: Toronto: "The City may, in its
sole discretion, cancel or suspend your access to
the datasets without notice and for any reason..."
- from Terms of Use

All of these licenses also suffer from the
additional mis-feature of arbitrary retroactivity:

    "The City may at any time and from time to
time add, delete, or change the datasets or these
Terms of Use. Notice of changes may be posted on
the home page for these datasets or this page. Any
change is effective immediately upon posting,
unless otherwise stated"


These two clauses mean that there is no stability
for someone using this data. If, something they do
or say (data related or not) is not liked by the
city whose data they are using, they can lose
access. Or if the city finds that many data users
are doing things they do not like, they can change
the terms of reference to impact data previously
obtained by users.

How to fix
Obligatory versioning of both datasets and
licenses, and losing the above two clauses. When a
dataset is released, it is given a version, and
that release is matched to a (usually the most
recent) license version, that will always apply to
that version of that data release. Any change to a
license generates a new version, only applicable
to subsequent releases that choose to use the new
license.

This is how things work in the Open Source world.
It means that if you possess a piece of Open
Source software, with a license of a specific
version, someone half-way across the world from
you cannot turn you into criminal and/or shut you
down by retroactively changing the license. It
means that you have stability. Of course, you may
be shut out of the next version if they change its
license, but that doesn't necessarily shut you
down today. You have some level of stability.

An example: an SME builds a business based on data
released by the cities. This business perhaps
included data mining tools that reveal some things
that some of the cities do not like revealed or
discussed. They change the license (remember:
"...cancel or suspend ...without notice and for
any reason...") to shut this company out, and they
go out of business.

-----

So, if you want to release Open Source code or
Open Data, you must be willing to accept that it
will be used in ways that you may find offensive,
to you (and/or your constituents). That is how it
works.

Posted by Glen Newton at 00:04
--
Karl Dubost
Montréal, QC, Canada
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/