Open Knowledge Belgium

Flemish Open Data licenses

Pieter Colpaert

Flanders has been working on their own Open Data Licenses. There are 5 licenses available in the guidelines: CC0, an Open Data License and 3 proprietary licenses which grant more rights to the people. We are happy with the licenses as they make decision towards Open Data quicker.

You can find the licenses over here (Dutch). These licenses are going to be used by Flemish government organisations to publish a lot of data in the coming years. Problems or remarks can still be sent, as the “version 1” on the document is implying.

OKFN Belgium wants to bring to the attention a couple of issues with the 3 last licenses. Datasets released under these licenses do not comply with the “Open” Definition and therefore cannot be called Open Data. They will not be able to be re-used in mash-ups, will not be able to be added to Wikipedia or Open Street Map, and will not help the world’s open knowledge any further. We do however understand that these licenses are needed as an intermediary step towards real Open Data. We hope however that most organisations will choose the CC0 license or the Open Data License.

Contact

Open knowledge Belgium VZW / asbl
Cantersteen 12
1000 Brussels
BE 0845 419 930
info@openknowledge.be

Online & social channels

TwitterGithubFacebookLinkedIn

</> Source code available under the MIT license. Content on this site, made by Open Knowledge Foundation, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Refer to our attributions page for attributions of other work on the site.