[OSM-legal-talk] Licensing Working Group report, 2009/01/22

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> By all means have an optional _poll_ beforehand among people who care. 

If 75% of participants in such a (public) poll say "cool, let's go ahead 
with this license" then I'd say it's ok to start offering it to mappers. 
If 75% say "I think this needs some more work BEFORE it is launched, not 
after" then it definitely needs work. Hard to say what happens in between.

As long as there's any meaningful consultation - i.e. a consultation 
that at least in theory could lead to the license being sent back to the 
drawing board, as Andy Robinson put it - I guess I'm ok with it.

I was just unsure because if you're looking at it from an evil angle, 
Mikel's words could be constructed as meaning: "We'll simply put a 
relicense button up on the web page as soon as the lawyers have finished 
the draft, and while all those mappers that don't have a clue happily 
relicense, we let the folks on legal-talk discuss everything into oblivion."

I have access to a large proportion of mappers in Germany. I have not 
made any attempt to discuss the license topic at large on the German 
mailing list because it seemed unnecessary to open up another place 
where the same stuff is discussed. Before the new license is being 
offered to mappers, however, I want the draft translated and dissected 
in the German community so that they, as far as possible, can form an 
opinion together, as a community. Even if they're not asked to give 
input but just make up their mind about "go or no-go", at least that 
time is required - BEFORE the license becomes active and BEFORE 
un-informed mappers may have made a choice they later regret.

Reading Mikel's postings, I felt there was a danger that OSMF could 
attempt to bypass this community opinion forming by offering the new 
license to mappers as soon as it was published. Such a political 
maneouvre would have been considered extremely bad style not only by 
myself. I now see that this was just paranoia on my part.

(It is probably even required to translate the license into German 
before a mapper from Germany can lawfully re-license; otherwise they can 
always claim they were not clear about what they were signing.)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"