[OSM-legal-talk] The OSM licence: where we are, where we're going

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> I've posted an update on the OpenStreetMap Foundation's current  
> activity on the licence issue to the Opengeodata blog:

Thanks. 

The license issue is important, it is, however, not "one of the most
debated aspects of the project" - I believe many little tagging things
range before it ;-)

That's the OSM pragmatism coming through (if we can't fix it, ignore
it) but of course in this case this won't make the issue go away. SO
it is good to see some people working on this.

I'm a bit sad about the fact that the Foundation seems to be
over-eager to avoid conflict of any sort. Yes, we're in this together,
and yes, we want to be a feel-good community and have it warm and cosy
and all; but we all remember the question about who was in favour of
going PD being asked at last year's SOTM, and we all remember that
there was an overwhelming majority in favour with only a few voices
against. 

Now I'm all for respecting the desires of minorities if practically
possible, but if a poll of all contributors should paint a similar picture,
then I'd say let us go PD (or let's follow the CC "open access data
protocol") sooner rather than later. It is hard to accept for me that
such a small number of people should have the say about the project we
all built together. And if we should go PD, then they're in a better
position: They can fork the project under any license they desire.

I feel that the Foundation should at least poll the contributors,
outlining the situation and asking whether people would prefer to use
the basically-PD open access stuff or the ODC duo of licenses. The
result of this poll should not be binding for the Foundation but given
them an idea of what people want.

Of course the wording of such a poll would have to be carefully
crafted and I suspect that this is what the Foundation didn't want to
get into, but I feel that's running away of sorts. It should be
possible to describe the alternatives objectively.

My personal, slightly non-objective view, is

PD - 
  pros - easy to implement, legally trivial, does not require
    policing, compatible (on the usage side) with any other data
  cons - will lead to loss of data by people who do not want to
    support PD, and may have compatibility issues on the import
    side (e.g. cannot import data that mandates attribution)

CC -
  pros - no loss of data, copyleft "spirit" remains intact, world
    becomes better place, legal requirement to give stuff back to
    OSM
  cons - needs to be policed and enforced, incompatible (on the
    usage side) with other free and non-free licenses, there will
    always be uses that 99% of the community thinks legitimate but
    are not covered by license

It's all a question of retain control over our work, or just
relinquish control and donate our work to whoever wants it, including
the evil guys.

And I say this again, if I saw that a majority of OSM contributers
thinks that the copyleft aspect is important, then I'd not have this
discussion. It is just that it seems to me that there are very few
people who hold up the CC banner. And most of these, after some
thinking, silently retract their banner when I ask them how they'd
combine OSM data with a GNU FDL source and what the result should be
licensed under...

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'