[Osmf-talk] New OSM contributor licensing under ODbL and CC-BY-SA started today

[Jochen Topf]

This contains: "You hereby grant to OSMF a worldwide, royalty-free,
non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable license to do any act that is restricted
by copyright over anything within the Contents"

Why is such as blanket license necessary?

This puts the OSMF in a unique position to undermine the whole project. If
somebody subverts the OSMF, he can do whatever he wants with the data. I don't
think its a good idea to expose the OSMF to even the possibility of that
happening. The whole point of the license is to give *nobody* a way to make
the once open data not open anymore. With the IMDB and the CDDB we have two
examples where this exact thing went bad. Not somebody coming from the outside
taking the data and making it proprietary, but somebody from the inside. 

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298