Halifax Regional Municipality has changed their license terms. It appears to me to be compatible with the OSM license. Is there a way to confirm this is true?
http://www.halifax.ca/opendata/OD_TermsOfUse.php
Clause 4 and clause 6(c) are the potential stumbling blocks.
Unless the OpenStreetmap licensing page already contains the full text of the last paragraph of clause 4, it will need to be added.
Clause 6(c) basically voids the licence where they have used material they are not free to licence, so you need to ensure that there is no such data included. In the UK, the two big risk areas would be postcodes and detailed Ordnance Survey mapping. I don’t know what sort of restricted sources Canadian local governent might be using.
Note this is not an official statement.
It looks like the wording of the license is identical to http://vancouver.ca/your-government/open-data-catalogue.aspx#tab19099 which is referenced on the Contributors page under Canadian Municipalities at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contributors#Canadian_Municipalities it seems like a safe option that as long as the Municipality is added to the contributors page in the same manner it should be fine.
The wording is similar to that used by UK national and local government, but you do have to be wary of clause 6(c) as it means that not all material under this licence can be used by OSM, and it can be quite difficult to know which bits are from third parties and which are the intellectual property of the local authority itself. E.g, in the UK, if a council used a similar licence and added postcodes by looking them up, the postcodes could not be used, whilst it seems to be generally accepted that if publishes material using the postcodes of businesses that were supplied by those businesses, on a form submitted to the council, those post codes are fair game.
Wouldn’t that clause also apply “downstream”, for people making use of OSM?
The arguement that has been used for OSM with respect to clauses liek claaue 4 is that it is acknowledged on the contributors page, even though the rendered maps just say "and contributors, and link, directly or indirectly to the contributors page. That’s why a change in the contributors page would be needed before the licence could be used. Life is easier in the UK, as councils adopting such licences use the standard government one. If every Canadian local authority wants its own acknowledgement, the contributors page could get unwieldy.
Any material compromised by clause 6(c) cannot be used in OSM, so there is no downstream licence terms issue.