[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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