[OSM-legal-talk] License Change Status?
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Tue Jul 1 14:43:40 BST 2008
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"
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