The EU Open Source Policy Summit 2022 on Friday 4 February 2022

[Robbie Morrison]

Hello all

The following EU Open Source Policy Summit 2022 is scheduled for Friday 4 February 2022.  Registrations are now open:

• https://summit.openforumeurope.org
  

The text on the theme Grand Challenges referred to in the title starts thus:

The grand challenges cannot be tackled by any company or country alone. Climate change, current and future pandemics, digital autonomy, market concentration, and reaching the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are all pressing issues that underscore the need for new institutional set-ups.

So climate change and decarbonization are near the top of the agenda.  In which case, I am just about to email the organizers and suggest this community has a slot in the program.

Open data licensing and legal metadata — the elephants in the room

High profile organizations like the Eclipse Foundation, LF Energy, and OpenUK are represented as key notes of course (and I know the speakers personally).  But none of these organizations deal with open data in any kind of satisfactory manner.  Indeed the Eclipse Foundation guidelines (Milinkovich 2017) on choice of data license are simply awful, with their EPL‑2.0 being favored.  And similarly LF Energy push their CDLA‑Permissive‑2.0 and will not entertain Creative Commons licenses (I know because I contribute to the LF Energy Data Architecture Working Group).

• Milinkovich, Mike (6 December 2017). Approved licenses for non-code, example, and other content. Eclipse Foundation.

Indeed, the Eclipse Foundation and the Linux Foundation simple promote their own instruments with no analysis (as far as I am aware) and none refer even once to CC‑BY‑4.0 or CC0‑1.0 — often regarded as best choices for data and metadata respectively and also my personal recommendations.  I have also pushed back on both fronts with no noticeable effect.  This kind of partisan approach (also known as "pushing your own barrow" to use an Australasian idiom) has no place here in my view.

In passing, the Free Software Foundation also similarly advocate their own GPL family of licenses, but these do provide excellent choices for copylefted software.

I would also like to see the Dublin Core set of 15 metadata fields adopted by default too.  An approach the UK Ofgem regulator is considering, to their credit (more here).  And I am also trying to get the LF Energy to consider legal metadata more generally as well, but the Linux Foundation Egeria metadata management tool that LF Energy promotes does not currently support the concept of legal metadata (as best I can tell, I will attend a webinar on Egeria next week and can post back an update as required).

Ultimately, someone with legal competency needs to do a full and proper legal analysis of public data license characteristics and interoperabilities.  To my knowledge, there are lots of claims floating around, including from national governments (for instance, in the OGL‑UK‑3.0 about section), but no substantial clause‑by‑clause analysis exists.  I requested that the Europe Commission do so in a recent public submission on the proposed EU Data Act (25 June 2021, page 4) but have not yet heard anything further.

There is a lot of hard work to do here on open data licensing and legal metadata, even among our open source allies!

Apologies for the open data licensing rave on a Sunday morning.

with best wishes, Robbie

-- 
Robbie Morrison
Address: Schillerstrasse 85, 10627 Berlin, Germany
Phone: +49.30.612-87617