[OSM-legal-talk] License Change Status?
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Tue Jul 1 15:35:30 BST 2008
Hi,
> being new to the legals-list, I tried to search on the wiki I found
> this
> link:
> http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262
Which is half a year old. In the mean time we have witnessed one guy
from Science Commons defending their recommendation of "CC0", and
SteveC going characteristically ballistic in response, and a little
bit of discussion about whether and how the "contractual" aspect of
the new license might work - but not a lot more than that.
> 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)?
I am not sure. Regarding the "PD vs Share-Alike" discussion, both
sides have been known to wildly exaggerate risks to a point where it
could be called demagogy. If you create a poll from the statements
issued in these discussions, the poll would look like this:
Would you prefer OSM to
a. become endlessly bogged down in legal hassles and die a slow death or
b. be sucked empty by evil Google & Co. and die a slow death?
Adding the question of license change to this "poll" might look like:
or would you prefer to
c. delete half our data and re-license the rest under a license
that's not used by anybody else on the web?
... all of which is not exactly what we want people to think ;-) and
this is probably the core of why we're not seeing the discussion we
ought to have. Too much danger of hurting people; a typical situation
encountered in politics where the politician knows that global
warming is a problem but at the same time anything he can do is
unpopular and will provoke lots of angry people shouting him down.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frederik at remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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