[OSM-legal-talk] about freedom in LGPL, and a bit of attribution stuff.

Thomas Walraet thomas at walraet.com
Sat Jul 8 02:53:02 BST 2006


Lars Aronsson a écrit :
> 
> You, on the other hand, stress the attribution component.

This is a minimum for me. At least an attribution to OSM, and on OSM 
website an attribution to any contributor that wish to be attributed. 
(As I understand it, it's something possible under a CC-SA 2.5)

I will continue to spend time drawing roads on OSM even if we switch to 
a license without SA. But not if there is no attribution.


> But the viral component (with or without the requirement of 
> attribution) primarily requires that any user of the derived work 
> (or mash-up) should be granted the freedom to use the entire 
> derived work on the same conditions (share alike) under which the 
> source (OSM) data were released.  How do you build that into a 
> Google Maps mash-up?  Or does the SA component mean we want to ban 
> all mash-ups between OSM and Google Maps?

What is needed is a clarification of what we consider a derivative work 
and when the copyleft apply.

Think of the LGPL software license, which have a copyleft if you modify 
and redistribute the code but allow dynamic linking with non-LGPL code.
LGPL is often chosen when the coder want to see his code widely used, 
even by proprietary software, but also want to forbid modification of 
his work to become proprietary.

This is exactly what I'd like. I'd like to see mash-ups, OSM layers, 
nice raster maps drawn by artist using OSM just for road layout. But I 
don't want someone to take my work, enhance it, and then forbid us to 
use the enhanced version.


If my point of view is not clear enough, I can give more example. But if 
everybody understand what I mean I will stop here and give an "Agree" at 
the first question on 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php?title=Licence_Type/Idea2 (Wawet76)
(It took me several hours to write this kind of mail in English :-/ )


> Should we chase 
> 17-year-old wanna-be hackers to court because they play around 
> with AJAX and the Google API?

If he don't tell visitors where the data came from, I will not chase him 
to court. But I will probably write him a gentle mail. (yes, I'm perhaps 
too focused on attribution)









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