[OSM-legal-talk] A quick thought on writing our own license

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

Having been to a few seminars, conferences, etc. where CC licenses were drafted, debated and so on, I just want to emphasise that writing a good license is *not* trivial.

Plenty of people have tried, and stuck them up on web sites. But they are very likely to be full of legal holes and problems. CC and the national organisations go through a painstaking process, with a huge amount of legal expertise, to arrive at each published version. The global and localised reach of CC is particularly relevant to OSM, as the discussion of database rights in the EU has shown.

A *huge* advantage of using CC licenses is that you get that expertise behind you. It's similar for licenses from GNU, Apache and (to a varying extent) major corporations.

If we do use another license, or write our own, we should be mindful of this and seek as much legal advice from around the world as possible.

Regards,
Tom