[OSM-legal-talk] License Telephone Debate

[Russ Nelson]

On Mar 15, 2009, at 8:33 PM, Simon Ward wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 08:26:14PM -0400, Russ Nelson wrote:
>>
>> On Mar 15, 2009, at 6:00 PM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>>> why are we bothering with switching OSM to 1.0 at all?
>>> Why not just wait for the 1.1 fixed version?
>>
>> 1) Because ODbL 1.0 is better than  C-By-SA
>
> So far that is one thing that is subject to debate.

You're changing the subject.  Gerv was wondering why we would switch  
to a license we know isn't perfect.  The answer is : because it's   
better.  OBVIOUSLY if it's not better, we wouldn't switch to it.
>
>> 2) Because it's not clear that we'll understand ODbL any time soon
>> well enough to fix any problems.
>
> If we don’t understand it we shouldn’t use it.


We didn't understand the negative aspects of the CC-By-SA, but we used  
*it*.  Are you saying that OSM shouldn't have been licensed at all,  
because at the time the licensing decision was made, people didn't  
understand exactly how it would work?

--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
russ at cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson