[OSM-legal-talk] The big license debate

[rob at robmyers.org]

Quoting Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemeD.net>:

> Lars Aronsson wrote:
>
>> The atlas you want to produce is a non-free one.  It doesn't
>> contribute to the domain of freedom that OSM wants to expand.
>
> Wuh? Hang on.
>
> I never signed up to a project that "wants to expand the domain of
> freedom". I signed up to an open mapping project. I see no gnu on the
> wiki.

OSM is a project that wants to produce maps that are free for people to use.
This it does, and the fact that the freedom of those maps cannot be removed is
not any kind of criticism of OSM.

> If you, or the free culture guys, have a philosophy that everything
> should be Free (in the GNU sense of the word) then that's great. Just
> don't think that OSM as a project shares the same ambition.

The OSM Foundation page states:

"The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international non-profit organisation
dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free
geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anybody to use and 
share."

So I would say that it does share that ambition.

I have discussed licensing with two public domain licensed projects, 
OCAL and PD
Burn. The reasons for both being PD are very sound, although it wouldn't have
killed OCAL to go for an LGPL-like license. I am actively involved in PD Burn.
I am not irrationally opposed to non-copyleft licensing.

But since the most successful """open""" projects are copyleft, and they have
beaten direct competition from non-copyleft projects (GNU-Linux/BSD,
Wikipedia/H2G2), it falls to those who want to deviate from this successful
pattern to explain why maps (or geodata) are different.

> OSM is
> made up of many people with many different beliefs, each with their
> own reason for contributing to the common denominator: open maps of
> streets.

Copyleft is the best protection of these diverse individuals ongoing 
ability to
access "open" maps of streets.

> I'm reminded of Steve's classic RMS joke:
>
> "So... open maps."

I assume that the joke is that RMS wouldn't say open. ;-)

Maps would most likely fall into RMS'es category of "reference works", 
which he
believes should be free, although they could be "functional works" as 
they tell
you how to do something (how to get somewhere).

I'll email him.

- Rob.