The Open Government Licence (OGL) is a copyright licence for Crown copyright works published by the UK government. Other UK public sector bodies may apply it to their publications. It was developed and is maintained by The National Archives. It is compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.
Since 2001, some works of the UK government had been made available under the Click-Use Licence. [1] This was replaced by the first version of the OGL [2] when it was released on 30 September 2010. The OGL was developed by The National Archives. [1]
The OGL was developed as part of the UK Government Licensing Framework, which also includes a non-commercial Government licence that restricts the commercial use of licensed content, as well as a charged licence for situations where charging for the re-use of content is deemed appropriate. [3]
The first version was designed to work in parallel with other licences such as those released by Creative Commons, [1] mirroring the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence and the Open Data Commons Attribution Licence. [4]
Version 2.0, released on 28 June 2013, is directly compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 and the Open Data Commons Attribution License. [5] The OGL symbol (shown above) was also released along with this version, which "at a glance, shows that information can be used and re-used under open licensing". [6]
Version 3.0 was released on 31 October 2014. [7] It is interoperable with Creative Commons' Attribution 4.0 licence, and an OGL-licensed work could be used in a CC-licensed work, however it should be clear that the material used is being used under the OGL and it should still be linked to the OGL. [8] [ ambiguous ][ dead link ]
The OGL permits anyone to copy, publish, distribute, transmit and adapt the licensed work, and to exploit it both commercially and non-commercially. In return, the re-user of the licensed work has to acknowledge the source of the work and (if possible) provide a link to the OGL. [9]
Version 3.0 of the licence carries the SPDX identifier OGL-UK-3.0. [10] The licence is also available in machine-readable format. [4]
The OGL applies to many but not all Crown copyright works. [9] The works must have been expressly released under the OGL terms by the relevant rights owner or authorised information provider. [11] The licence may also be used by other public sector bodies, such as local government, the National Health Service or the police. [4] It may be applied to texts, media, databases and source code. [4]
The OGL includes a list of types of information that it cannot cover. The licence states that it does not apply to: [9]
The Ministry of Defence interpret the "personal data" restriction to mean that photographs where "at least one individual is recognisable" cannot be OGL. [12]
Use of the OGL is encouraged by the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015, regulation 12 of which requires licences to be as non-restrictive as possible. [13]
The OGL is used by organisations at various levels within the UK Government, including:
National and local government organisations which create software are encouraged to publish the source code under the OGL. A key purpose of this is to enable civil servants and other government employees to engage more effectively with the open-source software community. [25]
The United Kingdom Parliament uses a similar "Open Parliament Licence" (OPL). [26]
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The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility.
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
The Cabinet Office is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is responsible for supporting the prime minister and Cabinet. It is composed of various units that support Cabinet committees and coordinate the delivery of government objectives via other departments. As of December 2021, it had over 10,200 staff, mostly civil servants, some of whom work in Whitehall. Staff working in the Prime Minister's Office are part of the Cabinet Office.
Open gaming is a movement within the tabletop role-playing game (RPG) industry with superficial similarities to the open source software movement. The key aspect is that copyright holders license their works under public copyright licenses that permit others to make copies or create derivative works of the game.
The Postcode Address File (PAF) is a database that contains all known "delivery points" and postcodes in the United Kingdom. The PAF is a collection of over 29 million Royal Mail postal addresses and 1.8 million postcodes. It is available in a variety of formats including FTP download and compact disc, and was previously available as digital audio tape. As owner of the PAF, Royal Mail is required by section 116 of the Postal Services Act 2000 to maintain the data and make it available on reasonable terms. A charge is made for lookup services or wholesale supply of PAF data. Charges are regulated by Ofcom. It includes small user residential, small user organisation and large user organisation details. There have been requests as part of the Open Data campaign for the PAF to be released by the government free of charge.
The Open Game License (OGL) is a public copyright license by Wizards of the Coast that may be used by tabletop role-playing game developers to grant permission to modify, copy, and redistribute some of the content designed for their games, notably game mechanics. However, they must share-alike copies and derivative works.
In the open gaming movement, a System Reference Document (SRD) is a reference for a role-playing game's mechanics licensed under a public copyright license to allow other publishers to make material compatible with that game. In 2000, Wizards of the Coast pioneered this by releasing a SRD for Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition under their Open Game License (OGL).
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed geodata sources. OpenStreetMap is freely licensed under the Open Database License and as a result commonly used to make electronic maps, inform turn-by-turn navigation, assist in humanitarian aid and data visualisation. OpenStreetMap uses its own topology to store geographical features which can then be exported into other GIS file formats. The OpenStreetMap website itself is an online map, geodata search engine and editor.
The European Union Public Licence (EUPL) is a free software licence that was written and approved by the European Commission. The licence is available in 23 official languages of the European Union. All linguistic versions have the same validity. Its latest version, EUPL v1.2, was published in May 2017. Revised documentation for v1.2 was issued in late‑2021.
The TN postcode area, also known as the Tunbridge Wells postcode area, is a group of 40 postcode districts in England, within 24 post towns. These cover south and west Kent and northern and eastern East Sussex, plus very small parts of Surrey and the London Borough of Bromley.
Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of mind work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work, meaning "works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose", including, in some cases, commercial purposes. Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.
Crown copyright is a type of copyright protection. It subsists in works of the governments of some Commonwealth realms and provides special copyright rules for the Crown, i.e. government departments and (generally) state entities. Each Commonwealth realm has its own Crown copyright regulations. There are therefore no common regulations that apply to all or a number of those countries. There are some considerations being made in Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand regarding the "reuse of Crown-copyrighted material, through new licences".
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system. The original version has since been revised, and its descendants are referred to as modified BSD licenses.
Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, freedoms refers to the use of the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work, with or without a fee. Licenses which implement copyleft can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works ranging from computer software, to documents, art, and scientific discoveries, and similar approaches have even been applied to certain patents.
data.gov.uk is a UK Government project to make available non-personal UK government data as open data. It was launched as closed beta in 30 September 2009, and publicly launched in January 2010. As of February 2015, it contained over 19,343 datasets, rising to over 40,000 in 2017, and more than 47,000 by 2023. data.gov.uk is listed in the Registry of Research Data Repositories re3data.org.
UK Power Networks (UKPN) is a distribution network operator for electricity covering South East England, the East of England and London. It manages three licensed distribution networks which together cover an area of 30000 square kilometres and approximately eight million customers.
Crown Copyright has been a long-standing copyright protection applied to official works, and at times artistic works, produced under royal or official supervision. In 2006, The Guardian newspaper's Technology section began a "Free Our Data" campaign, calling for data gathered by authorities at public expense to be made freely available for reuse by individuals. In 2010 with the creation of the Open Government Licence and the Data.gov.uk site it appeared that the campaign had been mostly successful, and since 2013 the UK has been consistently named one of the leaders in the open data space.
On April 21, 2021 data.europa.eu was launched as a single access point for open data published by EU Institutions, national portals of EU Member states and non-member states, as well as international organisations of predominantly European scope. The portal consolidates datasets previously available via the EU Open Data Portal and the European Data Portal into a single meta-catalogue. The European Data Portal, launched in its beta version on November 16, 2015, was an initiative of the European Commission, and part of the Digital Single Market.
Open access in New Zealand consists of policies and norms affecting making research outputs, data, and education materials openly available. This is influenced by tertiary education institutions as well as national government and changing international norms. The New Zealand Government has applied open access principles to its own work, adopting the New Zealand Government Open Access Licensing Framework (NZGOAL). It has not mandated that these apply to schools or the tertiary sector or to research funding agencies. Some tertiary education institutions have developed their own open access guidelines or policies but neither of the two major research funding agencies in New Zealand—the Marsden Fund and the Health Research Council—have done so, unlike Australia, Canada, Europe or the United States.
Most Crown copyright information is available under the Open Government Licence (OGL), with attribution of source. ... All licences should be as open and non-restrictive as possible. The Open Government Licence is an example of a non-restrictive licence. It is the default for most Crown bodies, and preferred for all public sector bodies in cases where information is supplied for re-use and no charge is made.
