[OSM-legal-talk] Beeing pragmatic

Jochen Topf jochen at remote.org
Wed Feb 20 08:07:46 GMT 2008


Hi!

This projects prides itself to be pragmatic. In fact, Steves pragmatism
founded this project. His willingness to say: I don't care what other
people think, I believe this is going to work and so this is how I am
going to do it. And whoever wants to, can join.

I am a strong believer in Copyleft. But seeing that I couldn't join the
OSM data with data from another community project, a local city wiki
(which is under the CC-BY-SA-NC license and as such incompatible with
the OSM license) made me think that there is a problem and there must
be a better way. I am not saying there is something wrong with Copyleft,
just that it might not be the best fit for OSM.

And now there is this huge discussion whether our license is even valid
and what other license may come up in a few months or years that might
fix this. It doesn't matter whether you believe CC is valid for data or
whether you believe the new proposed license is going to work for us
eventually. There obviously *is* considerable doubt in the whole process
and it will take years to resolve that. The discussion and the whole
process, at best, distracts us and, at worse, keeps us and others from
doing what we really want to do: Create a great community and the mother
of all geodata databases and use all that data for cool projects.

Pragmatism means doing what works best without any preconcieved notions.
Pragmatism means beeing able to change your mind if something doesn't
work. I changed my mind about the license. Not because I don't think
that it would be nice to have a Copyleft-type license, but I am trying
to be pragmatic. And in my opinion that means finding something that
works *now*, not chasing after something idealistic that might or might
not arrive.

The commercial data providers and users have a huge problem integrating
all the many data sources and re-integrating them whenever they change.
Only a gigantic integrated and open database like ours can ever begin to
solve this problem. So I don't fear that somebody might take the data.
Because we have something that nobody else has. We have a huge community
of people that contribute. And the community is growing. This is our
main asset and nobody can take that away from us. This community built
the data and it will keep it current. Everybody who takes our data will
have to come back again and again to get the current version. I believe
in what this community can accomplish and I think the last years have
shown that it can deliver. To say it with FDRs words: We have nothing to
fear, but fear itself. So lets not live in fear of what the bad people
might do and lets not spend months discussing what license we might want
to use if and when it gets finished. Instead lets build on our strong
points, lets build this community, lets be pragmatic, cut this Gordian
knot, go officially PD and go back to the productive work.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298





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