[OSM-legal-talk] The big license debate

[Richard Fairhurst]

Tom Chance wrote:

> The second is that a vocal minority makes enough noise in favour of  
> a BSD-type license or public domain declarations to override the  
> silent majority, who are quite happy with CC BY-SA.

That's an interesting point and deserves some discussion.

I think you're right that the silent majority are happy with our  
existing licence. They'd probably also be happy with PD. Doubtless  
they'd be happy with Fred's Special Chocolate-Flavoured Licence.  
Really, most people don't care. They just want to do some mapping and  
have fun doing so.

About a year ago, of those who cared, the opinion was about 80:20  
sharealike:PD. Now it's 50:50, I'd say, maybe even 45:55.

Etienne pointed to an interesting article about GPL vs BSD earlier,  
which compared Linux and the BSD OSs. It argues that Linux's copyleft  
licence has helped in its success. Conversely, of course, BSD's lack  
of copyleft meant it could be adopted by Apple and get onto a zillion  
desktops that way.

Which is "better"? Maybe neither. Maybe each have their pros and cons.  
But it seems pretty darn likely that, by analogy and by the  
already-demonstrated need, if OSM stays SA then another "open mapping"  
project will spring up with a different licence.

cheers
Richard