[OSM-legal-talk] Please enable commercial use

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> I am worried that in our zeal to avoid "a company with clever lawyers
> find[ing] a way to use our data without respecting the intent of the
> community" we will continue to make it too risky for small companies who
> do want to respect the intent but are worried that any one contributor may
> not agree with their interpretation.

The usual response to worries like this is "then find another business
model". I believe the new license will at least make possible some
uses that were until now commercially unattractive (for example I
believe that creating a work of art based on OSM data will, under the
new license, not force you to put that work of art under a CC
license - but I'm waiting for the next draft to examine that in
depth).

> The current license, and I believe
> the proposed pair of licenses, leave too much risk for well-intentioned
> small companies. It seems as though it is not our intent to preclude
> commercial use of the data, but with so many unknowns, only open source
> projects (who can let the viral nature propagate through the entire
> stack), or large companies (who can pay to find and defend loopholes) can
> comfortably use the data.

The usual response to this is that the propagation of the viral nature
is in fact intended.

I think the biggest problem for commercial users is probably the fact
that they can't get legal info from us - if they ask "can we do X"
then our response will always be "read the license and ask a lawyer".
If they say "but I would really like to do X, if you give me in
writing that I can do X I'll give you $10.000 and print OSM adverts on
every GPS I sell", then we still cannot say it because we're not the
owners of the data. 

Us being not the owner of the data is perhaps good considering how
some OSMers lean towards conspiracy theories, but still this is not a
very satisfactory situation for either us or the business approaching
us. 

The new license is excpected to make many things clearer, but still
the legal risk is with the people using the data - it takes only one
of 35,000 (and rising) OSM contributors to start a lawsuit, and no
license will ever be so watertight that nobody can feel mistreated.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"