[Imports] FYI: Board now requires imports list (in)compatibility with OSM CT (& will work on a template)

[Tobias Knerr]

On 28.11.22 22:00 Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> Can you give an example of ODBL compatible source incompatible
> with contributor terms?

Ok, so when we said "compatible with the Contributor Terms", what we 
meant was "would survive a hypothetical license change".

And the straightforward example of something that would _not_ survive a 
license change is an import of an external dataset which is itself using 
the ODbL license.

As a reminder, the Contributor Terms¹ have this paragraph:

OSMF agrees that it may only use or sub-license Your Contents as part of 
a database and only under the terms of one or more of the following 
licences: ODbL 1.0 for the database and DbCL 1.0 for the individual 
contents of the database; CC-BY-SA 2.0; or such other free and open 
licence (for example, http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/) as may from 
time to time be chosen by a vote of the OSMF membership and approved by 
at least a 2/3 majority vote of active contributors.

The idea was to make a future license change possible without losing 
data the way we did last time.

Now, we've failed the strict version of that goal already – we would 
definitely lose data in the event of a license change. And of course no 
license change is planned, so that might never be an issue.

Still, there's no need to make the problem larger unnecessarily. And 
it's a bit frustrating that we sometimes tie imports to the current 
license "by accident". That notably happens when someone wants to give 
data to OSM, and they think that licensing their data under the ODbL is 
the best/only way to achieve this.

So we want to create a legal template document that they can use 
instead: If someone just wants to "give data to OSM" (and has the right 
to do it, obviously), they can sign that document.

Perhaps it's a bit early to announce this seeing how no such template 
document is currently available. But hey, here we are.

Tobias