[OSM-dev] licensing question

andrzej zaborowski balrogg at gmail.com
Thu Aug 5 15:27:49 BST 2010


Hi,

On 5 August 2010 14:08, Serge Wroclawski <emacsen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 7:32 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
> <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Yes, I'm also pretty sure that you can just completely ignore the
>> license since you're only using the data within your own organization.
>> The licence only kicks in when you're doing re-distribution to third
>> parties.
>>
>> (See e.g. Google's use of Linux, they don't re-distribute their
>> changes, and don't have to)
>
> That's a feature of the license, not of licensing schemes.
>
> A license may have any number of terms in. It might say that any
> changes (internal or not) are required to be redistributed back to the
> upstream provider. This is a term that the original Plan 9 license
> had, for example.

There are conditions in which the organisation will be considered the
"user" of the data, and not the individuals in the organisation.
Similarly the organisation can be party to the ODbL contract instead
of an employee.  Surely one of these conditions is that the employment
contracts of all the employees oblige them to protect the company's ip
and obey contracts the company has with others (and most employment
contracts do say that).  So in these conditions, as Ævar says, they
can do whatever they want internally. IMO

On that note the debian free software guidelines do include a test
that can be applied to a license text that ensure users don't have to
do anything unless they redistribute the binaries for example (the
desert island test).

Cheers



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