New research: Understanding the drivers of license proliferation – Open Knowledge International Blog

"Open licensing is still a major challenge for open data publication. In a recent blog post on the state of open licensing in 2017 Open Knowledge International identified that governments often decide to create custom licenses instead of using standard open licenses such as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

This so-called license proliferation is problematic for a variety of reasons. Custom licenses necessitate that data users know all legal arrangements of these licenses – a problem that standard licenses are intended to avoid by clearly and easily stating use rights. Custom licenses can also exacerbate legal compatibility issues across licenses, which makes it hard (or impossible) to combine and distribute data coming from different sources. Because of legal uncertainties and compatibility issues, license proliferation can have chilling effects on the reuse of data and in the worst case prevent data reuse entirely."