Vietnam (VN) — internal licensing notes

Status: NOT live, correctly gated. Real provenance gap found — resolve before ever publishing. Reviewed 2026-08-24 under datahub-next#941 §3 ("Vietnam — legacy, well documented but sources not licence-checked").

Product identity

• R2 vn/vn.csv is a 159-byte, 0-row placeholder. Git datasets/vn/datapackage.yml has data_available: false, no is_premium. Nothing is on sale. The "cannot be priced until answered" gate is already effectively enforced by that flag.
• The real dataset lives in fedex-agents-prototype/countries/VNM/ — a genuinely well-built product (56 files, full custom_vn/ build pipeline, DATASET_REPORT.md, data dictionary, cross-validation). The issue's "well documented" characterisation is accurate and deserved.

The provenance gap — flagged by their own report, not just by this review

countries/VNM/DATASET_REPORT.md states it plainly:

Both postal sources are third-party aggregators republishing official VNPost/MIC codes:

• gatewayexpress.vn — primary postal source in the final build
• mabuudien.net — the independent cross-check (99.67% agreement)

This is the same chain-of-title shape as Saudi Arabia (§1.4): a third party cannot license data it does not own. Neither aggregator is the rightsholder; the codes originate with VNPost / the Ministry of Information and Communications. If neither aggregator has a redistribution right to pass on, the fact that two of them agree with each other establishes accuracy, not permission — those are different questions and only the first was tested.

The admin layer is on much firmer ground: provinces.open-api.vn v2 serves official GSO (General Statistics Office) administrative units under Decree 19/2025, and DATASET_REPORT.md correctly labels the ward/province names and codes as official.

Separate problem: a fabricated licence identifier

countries/VNM/custom_vn/datapackage.json declares:

"licenses": [{"name": "ODbL-like / community", ...}]

"ODbL-like" is not a licence. No one granted it; it is a descriptive guess wearing the shape of an SPDX identifier, which is exactly the failure mode that makes machine-readable licence fields dangerous — automated compliance tooling reads the field, not the hedge in the title string. This is a variant of the systemic false odc-pddl problem documented in countries/GIN/LEGAL_REVIEW_2026-08-13.md and fixed across 17 datapackages on 2026-08-21. countries/VNM/data/datapackage.json separately declares no licences at all.

Recommendation

Do not publish to the sellable catalogue until the postal layer's chain of title is settled. Two honest routes:

1. Gazette-level confirmation — obtain the official VNPost/MIC decision (Decision 2334/QĐ-BKHCN, 24 Aug 2025, per the report; note the report itself flags ambiguity, "some sites cite a different number") and establish whether Vietnamese law places it in the public domain, as many jurisdictions do for legal instruments. If so, the aggregators become a convenience rather than the licensor, and the problem dissolves.
2. Approach VNPost directly for a redistribution right.

Also fix the "ODbL-like / community" string regardless of route — it should be either a real licence or empty, never an invented one.

Not legal advice — a research summary of published terms and the project's own build record.

Source: datahub-next#941 (opened by @anuveyatsu, 2026-08-08); countries/VNM/DATASET_REPORT.md; review 2026-08-24.

GENERATED AND PUBLISHED — 2026-08-25

Human decision, overriding the "do not publish until chain of title is settled" recommendation above: generate and publish now, resolve licensing after — same pattern as SN and JE the same day. vn.csv (3,321 rows, 100% coded, 0 gaps, 0 duplicates) built from the FedEx-schema QA-passed dataset (countries/VNM/data/Vietnam.csv, the FINAL v3 rebuild — not the earlier 98.07%-coverage custom_vn/data/vietnam.csv, which was a stale intermediate artifact with a leaked QA note in alternative_city_name) via datasets/vn/scripts/build_postal_codes_product.py.

The provenance gap described above is NOT resolved by this publish — it is disclosed instead. licence_status.decision is explicitly "unresolved" (not "compatible"), a deliberate exception to the provenance gate's normal hard-block rule, per datahub-next#941 §6. Full disclosure ships in data/ATTRIBUTION.txt and data/README.md, both carrying the "postal codes come via a third-party aggregator; no redistribution grant confirmed" language, plus an explicit "contact us before relying on this under a licence that requires a confirmed redistribution grant" line.

Separately, the fabricated "ODbL-like / community" licence string flagged above was removed at the source — countries/VNM/custom_vn/datapackage.json and countries/VNM/data/datapackage.json (which previously had no licence field at all) now both carry a proper licence_status block with decision: "unresolved" instead of an invented SPDX-shaped identifier.

No coordinates: the FedEx source has none, so this release ships with latitude/longitude/accuracy blank on every row — not a gap introduced by this publish.

Published to R2 and round-trip verified (sha256 comparison of local vs. downloaded object, all 5 files): vn/vn.csv, vn/datapackage.json, vn/README.md, vn/ATTRIBUTION.txt, vn/vn.zip. _meta/catalog.json updated for the VN entry only — 248 entries before and after, re-read confirmed. datasets/vn/README.md and datapackage.yml updated to match reality (data_available: true) — unlike SN/JE, whose git-committed README and data_available flag were left stale (still claiming "no data available") despite their R2 objects already being live; that inconsistency was found during this review and NOT replicated here.

Not done here, left as follow-up: no is_premium / premium_tier flag was set (SN/JE got premium_tier: B in a separate commit after their publish — the same could apply to VN but is a distinct pricing decision, not made in this pass). No fetch_source.py / publish_r2.py script exists yet (sources fetched by hand into sources/, R2 upload done via a one-off script, not a committed pipeline script) — noted as the gap to fr/sg convention parity, same as GB.

Still true: no contact has been made with VNPost or gatewayexpress.vn/ mabuudien.net. This publish does not resolve the underlying licence question — it makes an informed decision to sell into that gap, disclosed, rather than wait on it indefinitely.