[OSM-legal-talk] License Change Status?
Stefan Neufeind
openstreetmap at stefan-neufeind.de
Tue Jul 1 15:06:05 BST 2008
Frederik Ramm wrote:
> 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!
Hi Frederik,
being new to the legals-list, I tried to search on the wiki I found this
link:
http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262
Does still sum up the situation well? What alternatives do exist? Would
a more clear explanation on the alternatives and maybe an informal
"poll" (through a webtool) among contributors help find feelings of the
contributors and allow the Foundation to take a "wise" decision that is
best community-backed (or see if further details need explanation to the
community)?
Kind regards,
Stefan Neufeind
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