[OSM-legal-talk] Please enable commercial use

Nathan Vander Wilt nate-lists at calftrail.com
Wed May 7 16:33:06 BST 2008


On May 7, 2008, at 1:24 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>> If there were clear Community Norms I could follow as far as
>> Attribution and Share Alike, backed by a license that said "we've
>> tried our hardest to dedicate all these facts back into the public
>> domain" (ie http://www.opendatacommons.org/odc-public-domain-dedication-and-licence/)
>> , I would feel covered enough both ethically and legally to use the
>> data without fear of reprisal.
>
> Why would you not feel covered ethically and legally if you followed  
> the
> terms, as written, of the proposed new licensing scheme?

I would not feel so worried ethically under the new license, as it is  
fairly clear on a number of things that DON'T result in derived works  
(combining with other map layers, the software that uses it).  
Especially if OSM could provide something like the PDDL's Community  
Norms (though the license would have the final say legally) that  
outline what kind of attribution (Notice) is expected in enough common  
scenarios.

>
>> The main ambiguity is "who am I and my customers liable to?", that  
>> is:
>> does each contributor reserve the right to determine things like
>> whether the license notice was "reasonably calculated" enough to make
>> users aware, or whether a greatly abbreviate form of such notices is
>> acceptable in certain circumstances (eg on a printout), what
>> constitutes a substantial extraction or derivative.
>
> Do you really think the first action of someone aggrieved over this
> would be to sue you?

You are right, I think I'd worked myself into an overly paranoid mood  
over the the ambiguities of the current license and the supposed  
futility of keeping anything public domain inside the OSM project. For  
the uses I imagine me personally or my company needing to make of the  
data, the proposed license pair only makes us do pretty much what we'd  
have wanted to do anyway (give credit where it's due and keep the data  
itself free).

I still hope the Foundation and the community will consider the PDDL/ 
Community Norms license/guidelines suggested by the Science Commons  
instead. While I will happily use (and even continue my small  
contributions to) the OSM data under the proposed license pair, I  
still find it sad that we feel the need to play the same Intellectual  
Property bludgeoning game as our closed competitors, at the expense of  
our many public domain contributors.

Anyway, thanks all for sharing, you've helped me narrow down what my  
issues are with the license(s). As it seems they are in the end mostly  
ideological rather than practical, I think it's time for me to get  
back to coding instead of contending.

thanks,
-natevw




More information about the legal-talk mailing list