[OSM-legal-talk] License Change Status?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

   what's the status of the license change plans? Have they run  
aground - I had been told a few months ago that a new release of  
Jordan's draft would be imminent. What's more, the license itself -  
about which we'll hear at SOTM - is only one little piece of the  
puzzle. The whole transition process - which, correct me if I'm  
wrong, is not scheduled to be discussed at SOTM at all - is surely as  
difficult. Will we attempt to employ legal tricks to re-license work  
of people who don't respond to our license change spam email? What  
exactly will we delete if people say "no" to the license change? (It  
has been said that even the pub on the street corner may be a work  
derived from the road data... and vice versa.) How many people have  
to say "no" for us to stop the change altogether? What would we do  
then, stick with CC-BY-SA and hope nobody notices? After a license  
change, would we keep a "parallel universe" a.k.a. "fork" of OSM  
holding the old, not-relicensed data until the wounds in the new data  
set have healed?

Is it possible that this whole transition process and the associated  
questions are such a delicate matter that everybody prefers not to  
think about it, much less talk about it? That would be very well  
understandable but at the same time dangerous. It seems clear to me  
that the current license works only as long as people don't look  
closely.

Need I say that, had we decided to simply go PD when last year's SOTM  
panel found that there was broad support for it, we would now be one  
happy project with all the legal hassles out of the way? It's not to  
late to see the light!

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"