The Open Government License is itself just a license. It is basically CC
BY with a few modifications: it deals with EU database rights (which
previous versions of CC didn't) and includes pre-baked conditions on
what it doesn't apply to just in case the government accidentally
release a whole load of stuff and fail to do due diligence on what it
contains.
The important bit of the OGL isn't the license itself but the Public
Sector Information (PSI) licensing framework which requires works that
are eligible for Crown Copyright produced by or on behalf of central
government to licensed under the OGL. This applies regardless of whether
the work is actually licensed as such.
I don't know whether the Welsh and Scottish governments have done
similarly to HM Government. That's a matter that should really be raised
with the local equivalents of the Cabinet Office.
I've dealt with a lot of OGL-related issues on Commons, and in the
process of one DR consulted with the Department for Culture, Media and
Sport. You can see the DRs here (and the first one has an OTRS ticket
for my contact with the government lawyers):
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Olympic_m…
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Canoe_Sla…
There's a page on Meta that I created a while back to track use of OGL
material and document the issues around it (as well as point to
templates/categories on sites like Commons and Wikisource).
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_Licence
The other thing to consider is that OGL licensing applies on top of
other license. If the government have released an image on Flickr as
something like CC BY-ND, you can use the image under that license
(although not on Wikimedia, obviously). But it's also Crown Copyright,
and if it is a work of central government, OGL applies AS WELL AS CC
BY-ND. In the above deletion requests, we've had issues where people
have said "Yeah, but it's CC-BY-ND" because that's what it says on
Flickr.
Another caveat is that the proceedings of Parliament are not covered by
the OGL. They are instead covered by the Open Parliamentary Licence. And
the proceedings of the Scottish Parliament are covered by the Open
Scottish Parliamentary Licence. The OPL is basically the same as the OGL
but with the word "Parliament" instead of "Government". The Scottish
one
is the same except it contains references to the appropriate Scottish
legislation and institutions.
I know a fair bit about this stuff because back in 2011, I worked for a
government-sponsored technology non-profit that existed precisely
because of OGL/PSI. The government could do a much better job of making
this stuff clear. (It'd help also if Flickr let accredited UK Gov
agencies apply OGL on images.)
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>