[OSM-legal-talk] Rules for the foundation to hold data assigned to it under

[OJW]

On Friday 20 July 2007 23:28, you wrote:
> >> PD data will always be free
> >
> > It's trivial to convert PD data to restrictively-licensed data.
>
> That doesn't make the original PD data any less free.

It means that contributors are rewarded for making restrictively-licensed 
changes to the map (by getting exclusive rights to a map which is better than 
the PD map they started with), and that contributors are not rewarded for 
making freely-copiable changes to the map (other people just rip-off their 
work and sell it without giving anything back)

It means that the latest copy of the map is not necessarily available for you 
to use.  

You just have to pay to host the out-of-date "public domain" version from 
before people started adding their cool proprietary stuff to the map.

It makes it very rewarding for sombody to make a restrictively-licensed fork 
of the project, attracting the community of contributors to their project 
(and away from OSM), e.g. with the promise of extra features that are only 
available in the proprietary version.  

Those "extra features" could even be as simple as an advertising campaign and 
the backing of a well-known company.  Suddenly the general public knows that 
they can play with this "nearly free" (proprietary) project containing all 
our footpaths etc, and never know the existance of original project, nor 
understand why they might want to contribute freely-copiable data.