[OSM-legal-talk] moving up the stack

[Richard Fairhurst]

Tom Chance wrote:

> You're proposing PD dedication, right?

No, I'm not. I mean, personally, I like PD a lot, and I'm happy for  
all the stuff I contribute to OSM - code, maps, barely literate  
mailing list rants - to be such. But I'm not proposing it as a model  
for OSM; it'd be lovely, but I wouldn't want to require people to  
adopt something they really don't believe in. (I'm too much of a  
classic liberal for that. :) )

FWIW I really think the best real-world solution for OSM would be a  
share-alike data licence (or a share-alike data-only interpretation of  
CC-SA if you can pull it off), as I blogged in June last year.

> I'm just turning your question on its head. Why should we all lose   
> the benefits that share-alike affords us, just because you want to   
> work off a particular business model that it might not support,   
> especially when it will likely support many other business models?   
> Copyleft advocates faced down similar demands with the GPL, and just  
>  look at how the free software community has prospered.

Sure. We shouldn't lose the benefits of share-alike, given that this  
is the will of the community. It's just a scope thing.

My problem - not yours, not OSM's, mine, I accept that - is that a  
set-top box manufacturer can embed Linux, contribute any source  
changes back to the community, and still make a healthy living from  
selling set-top boxes. I can't do that as a cartographer-for-hire, not  
since the advent of the scanner, the colour photocopier and the www.

cheers
Richard