[OSM-legal-talk] Progressing OSM to a new data Licence regime

[rob at robmyers.org]

Quoting Iván Sánchez Ortega <ivansanchez at escomposlinux.org>:

> El Lunes, 4 de Febrero de 2008, MJ Ray escribió:
>> CC's licences are pretty good, but not as brilliant as the hype IMO.
>> Maybe their advice will or won't work for the OSM.  Keep an open mind.
>>
>> Related: shall we ask debian-legal about the osm-legal-talk thread?
>> It would be good to have OSM data in debian and similar without problem.
>
> IMHO:
>
> - CC deals with licenses for art.
> - Debian deals with licenses for software.
> - Geographical information is neither art or software.

"Software" can mean any collection of computer data (DVDs are  
"software" for example), although the meaning of "software" most  
people use is "executable programs".

If someone competent from Debian Legal could gather up notes on the  
licence that might be very useful. Debian Legal are very experienced  
at identifying issues with licences, and the issues they identify are  
often of general interest.

 From past experience my advice would be to take notice of any issues  
Debian Legal identify that are of concern to OSM, and to ignore any  
issues that are of interest only to Debian Legal. In particular I  
wouldn't worry about DFSG-compliance just for the sake of it.

- Rob.