Page MenuHomePhabricator

Extend list of licenses allowed for data files on Commons to include OGL
Open, Needs TriagePublic

Description

At the moment, the Commons data namespace is limited to a set of defined license codes. Any attempt to add a data file which has a different license is rejected with the message:

Error: Parameter "license" must be one of the valid license codes, for example CC0-1.0, CC-BY-1.0, CC-BY-2.0, CC-BY-2.5, CC-BY-3.0, CC-BY-4.0, CC-BY-4.0+, CC-BY-SA-1.0, CC-BY-SA-2.0, CC-BY-SA-2.5, CC-BY-SA-3.0, CC-BY-SA-4.0, CC-BY-SA-4.0+, ODbL-1.0

As far as I can work out this particular list was selected in 2018 in T200968. There are still open issues around handling licenses for datasets (tabular data or map files) on Commons "properly", but the principle of allowing non-CC0 licenses was approved with T154071, so it should be okay to add new ones to this list if they are comparable to existing licenses.

I'd like to ask for us to add:

  • OGL-1.0
  • OGL-2.0
  • OGL-3.0

These are the three variants of the Open Government License, which is explicitly stated to be compatible/interoperable with CC-BY (CC-BY-4.0 for v 2 & 3, "any" for v 1), so there should be no legal issues that are not already present from allowing CC-BY data.

The OGL is the license used to release data by the UK government; I am hoping to use it to upload high-quality open data shapefiles released by the Ordnance Survey.

Event Timeline

The OGL deals with sui generis database rights, so it's a suitable open data license (unlike most older variants of Creative Commons licenses):

'Use' means doing any act which is restricted by copyright or database right, whether in the original medium or in any other medium, and includes without limitation distributing, copying, adapting, modifying as may be technically necessary to use it in a different mode or format.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

From https://research.okfn.org/avoiding-data-use-silos/ :

Several widely known licences address database rights. The Open Data Commons licences Open Database Licence 1.0, (ODbL) and Open Data Commons Attribution Licence 1.0 (ODC-BY) were the first to address database rights. The Creative Commons Zero public domain dedication (CC0), as well as version 4.0 of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY), and Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) licences cover database rights as well as regular copyright. Beyond these re-usable standard licences, governments develop their own licences to cover database rights such as the Open Government Licence (OGL 3.0) or the Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data (NLOD).

I would like to have the German GeoNutzV (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:GeoNutzV) license added as an allowed license. It is basically the same as CC-BY.

I would like to have the German GeoNutzV (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:GeoNutzV) license added as an allowed license. It is basically the same as CC-BY.

Filed as T289398. Patch pending review since September 2021: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/JsonConfig/+/719262/ :-(