Open Licences

EDITORS: Group

The process of granting open licences is essential to give users of the platform, and GitHub, the right to share, use and build on open data and open code respectively. Recommendations for open data and open code licences were made in 2016 by Tom Russell.

For open data platforms, open licences are required for both data and for software. In terms of data sharing, owing to the fact that built environment stakeholders span the private, public and third sectors, open licences need to ensure third party use, to permit innovative collaborative working with commercial firms. All open data generated by Colouring London were therefore released under an OKF Open Database Licence (ODbL). This type of licence is also used by OSM (OpenStreetMap Wiki, 2021d). It is similar to the Creative Commons CC BY licence, but is designed for databases rather than individually collected records (Creative Commons 2021). It allows users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt data, as long as Colouring London and its contributors are credited. To maximise openness, the licence requires that data can be altered or built on and that the result may only be distributed under the same licence type.

Information on Colouring London’s ODbL licence is provided on the Contributor Agreement page). The Contributor Agreement also states that data sources need to be included where possible to improve accuracy. This ODbL agreement, like the Code of Conduct, has to be accepted on the platform’s sign-up page, along with the Data Accuracy Agreement (see below), before users can edit data. The latter agreement was considered necessary by the author to protect host institutions against claims relating to data inaccuracy.

Copyright on Colouring London open code, released via GitHub, is shared among all contributors and licenced under a GNU General Public Licence (GPL), version 3 or later. This is a commonly used open software licence published by the Free Software Foundation. It was selected by Russell as it ensures that code can be reproduced at no cost and allows end users the freedom to run, share and modify the software, provided that the source is credited and that the code is released on the same or equivalent licence terms.

(Open data licences were first released in 2002 by Creative Commons, a non-profit organisation in the US (Creative Commons 2021). Creative Commons (CC) licences provide flexibility for authors (and can include options for non-commercial or commercial use). These also help protect users from copyright infringement. The most permissive is the CC BY licence. In 2014 CC licences were approved by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) (Open Knowledge Foundation 2021b and 2021c), founded in the UK in 2004 to promote open knowledge. These conform to the OKF’s open requirement which states that data must be available at no more than reproduction cost, accessible in easily modifiable form, be able to be reused, redistributed and mixed with other data, and must not discriminate against fields of endeavour, people or groups (ibid.).