Guide to Public Geodata Licensing

This is an outline draft of what is intended to be a guide to open geodata licensing options and current precedents, written to help public administrations choose or design an open license for their data.

It is inspired by the Open Knowledge Foundation's Guide to Open Data Licensing.

Introduction

• Informative, not normative
• Collective and growing guidelines

Open License Concept

• OSI software licensing, open knowledge definition, etc.

Data Licensing Styles

Copyright

Non-Commercial constraints

(each summarised with pros and cons, references at the end)

Existing Open Licenses by Country

Canada

• Manitoba Land Inititative - https://web2.gov.mb.ca/mli/ Custom License: Despite the data is Crown Copyright, all use, including commercial use is free of cost. A clause prohibits the sale of data without "added value" modification.

References

• EDINA paper in particular
• highlights of OSM-legal-talk
• a lot of other mailing list posts, blog entries, etc

See Also

• Geodata Licensing
• Geodata Committee