Some time ago I blogged about freely available government geospatial data in various parts of the world, but mentioned that in the Netherlands only some data was freely avaiilable.  At the recent Geospatial World Forum in Amsterdam, Melanie Schulz van Haegen-Maas Geesteranus, Minister of Infrastructure and the Environment said that in January the government of the Netherlands announced that all government geo data is available to the public (with some exceptions) and that the Netherlands topographic database was made open and free instead of costing €50 000. According to EPSIplatform in October of last year the Dutch government announced it would release core geo data sets to the public free of charge for re-use, starting January 1st 2012 under a Creative Commons By Attribution license.  On January 1st, the Dutch OpenStreetMap community filed a request to obtain the geo data of the Dutch Cadastre (Kadastre).  The Kadastre granted the request on 3 January, and provided some 5 Gigabytes of data to OpenStreetMap.  The Dutch Cadastre (parcels) is available on Google Map.  The Dutch government released the Dutch national road data set in December.  Postcodes have also been released without conditions for re-use.  The most important geo data sets in the Netherlands are now available for all types of re-use free of charge.

The first time I had come across a government planning to use a Creative Commons license for sharing geospatial data was at an Spatial Sceinces Institute (SSI) conference in Hobart, Tasmania in 2007 where two people from the government of Queenland proposed this as a way of sharing geospatial data within the government of Queensland.  Of course OpenStreetMap used a Creative Commons license for years until April of this year, when it was replaced by a license specifically tailored for geo data.