[OSM-legal-talk] legal-talk Digest, Vol 19, Issue 1

[Richard Fairhurst]

Rob Myers wrote:

> John Wilbanks wrote:
>
>> ps - Those of you interested in copyleft and freedom might want to
>> interview Stallman on this issue as well.
>
> I tend not to agree with him on non-software issues but I would be  
> very
> interested to know what he thinks, particularly since he has just been
> through a major copyleft licence revision process.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog posting arguing against share- 
alike/copyleft (I won't draw a distinction for the purpose of this  
mail) for geodata, largely on the grounds that there was no boundary  
drawn (by CC-BY-SA in particular) between "source data" (geodata) and  
"finished product" (map etc.).

Someone took it on themselves to e-mail this to RMS and then forward  
me his reply, which was strongly pro-copyleft for geodata. His  
opinion (IIRC) was roughly that maps should be share-alike anyway, so  
he didn't see the problem that I claimed.

But then my opinions are pretty much opposite to his on everything  
anyway, so that's no great surprise.

I believe Steve has had some contact with him in the past - there's a  
great "So... open maps" gag in Steve's talk at http:// 
www.opengeodata.org/?p=86 .

cheers
Richard