[OSM-legal-talk] Beeing pragmatic

Andy Robinson (blackadder) blackadderajr at googlemail.com
Wed Feb 20 09:56:34 GMT 2008


Jochen Topf wrote:
>Sent: 20 February 2008 8:08 AM
>To: Licensing and other legal discussions.
>Subject: [OSM-legal-talk] Beeing pragmatic
>
>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.
>

here here. Thanks Jochen, nice post.

Cheers

Andy






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