[OSM-legal-talk] License Change Status

John Wilbanks wilbanks at creativecommons.org
Tue Jul 1 16:38:09 BST 2008


Frederik,

I'm still lurking on this list - rather than demagogue the issue, I'm 
mainly watching the comments and trying to learn from them. It's 
actually very interesting to watch a community struggle with the issues 
in real time.

In the absence of evidence - this is all very new - there's a ton of 
ideology-based assumptions that we all are making in this debate, both 
in the pro-share alike faction and here at Science Commons in favor of 
the PD. As I've noted here and elsewhere, my ideology is that *data 
integration is essential* and that leads me to my conclusions. Thus, I 
think that the Share Alike choice on data is a closed choice in 
disguise, and that PD is the natural state of data on the network. Time 
will provide us with the evidence we need to make data-driven decisions.

In the interim there has been a fair amount of movement in other areas 
of geospatial that have reached out to SC to do PD work, so I'm focusing 
most of my energy in this space on that area. Spending my time preaching 
doesn't seem the best investment when I can instead work to help 
communities that already want to build PD-based systems...

jtw

_______________________

legal-talk-request at openstreetmap.org wrote:
Message: 5
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 16:35:30 +0200
From: Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>
Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] License Change Status?
To: "Licensing and other legal discussions."
	<legal-talk at openstreetmap.org>
Message-ID: <3FA71240-6FE4-4B02-8AA8-3F40C048604F at remote.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; delsp=yes; format=flowed

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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