Public-interest open-licence reference
Compare and understand open licences for data, code, and content.
CLIPol catalogues the open-licence landscape — Creative Commons, the Open Data Commons family, government licences from Canada, the UK, France, New Zealand, Australia, and Italy, and the open-source code licences relevant to mixed data-and-code projects. Compare licence terms side-by-side, check compatibility before combining sources, and find the practical implications of switching from one open licence to another.
Side-by-side comparison
Pick any two licences in the catalogue and read them side-by-side — what each permits, requires, and forbids, with the practical differences highlighted. Useful when you're choosing a licence or auditing one you've inherited.
Compatibility checking
Check whether data or content under one open licence can be legally combined with material under another — what attribution flows, what share-alike obligations propagate, and where the combination produces a more-restrictive result than either licence alone.
Open source itself
The CLIPol comparison tool is open source — see the working repository at github.com/kmewhort/clip — originating from CIPPIC at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law.
Catalogue
Licences in the CLIPol catalogue.
Frequently referenced
The pages CLIPol is most often linked to.
Licence 16
GeoBase / Canada family
The cluster of Canadian federal geospatial-data licences (GeoBase, GeoGratis, and successor sub-licences) — referenced from comparison work by Leigh Dodds and the Open Data Institute.
Open →
Licence 69
Open Government Licence — Canada 2.0
Canada's federal open-government licence — the 2013 successor to the GeoBase / GeoGratis family, drafted for compatibility with CC BY 4.0 and the Open Data Commons family.
Open →
Tool
Compatibility checker
Check whether combining data under two different open licences produces a legal result, and what attribution / share-alike obligations the combination triggers.
Open →