[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL modules?

[Andrew Turner]

I was hoping to have more feedback on this - especially from those
working directly on the license itself such as Steve, Nick, or other
OSMF board.

My responses inline:

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 5:01 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Andrew Turner wrote:
>> One thing that has made Creative Commons incredibly successful is the
>> modularity of the various components: Attribution, Share-Alike,
>> Non-Commercial, etc.
>
> Yes, I find it incredibly useful to effectively have 10 different
> licenses that somehow all sound as if they are one family but on closer
> inspection aren't compatible.

I would like to know more about how they're not compatible?

Largely the benefit here is marketing. Compare the popularity and
understanding of Creative Commons versus
Affrero/GPL/LGPL/Apache/Mozilla, et al. Even MIT & BSD are confusing
despite being nearly the same thing.

The goal should be to offer an understandable and usable set of
licenses that gets data easily shared out. It can't be any harder than
choosing from a set of radio buttons/select box or people won't do it.
And in addition it is a large barrier to entry for it's consumption.
Again, the CC licenses have won because sites like Flickr can have an
easy paragraph explaining them, a checkbox for all your photos, and a
nice little icon as well as ability to search by a license, showing
users what the acceptable uses of the data are.

>
>> And anyone that may want
>> to apply a different license to their particular data will be forced
>> to create a whole new license, a large economic and social cost

How is this different if there *aren't* modules? The modules concept
allows the 80% use case to not have to spend a large amount of
resources figuring out the various licenses and making a new one for
each application.

Suggesting that someone can "just copy ... and strike out the words
they don't like" is not actually an option. For one, this is a new
license that has to be verified, vetted - and no one else will know
what the implications are or ability to trust the license. And then we
get into the multitude of minor variations that create more confusion
and the too easy answer "opening the data is too hard and frought with
land-mines, let's not do it"

Can anyone working on the actual license provide feedback here?

>
> They can just copy the license and strike out the words they don't like.
> At least that way users aren't fooled into thinking that they could
> somehow use "ODbL-SA" data in an "ODbL-NC" project, or "ODbL-NC" data in
> an "ODbL-SA" project, or "ODbL-SA" data in an "ODbL-BY" project, or
> "ODbL-NC" data in an "ODbL-BY" project, or ...
>
>> In addition, the combination of data under these various licenses can
>> be more clearly, and early, determined so it's possible to pull in,
>> say, ODbL-Attribution into ODbL-ShareAlike-Attribution. This would
>> greatly help the OSM effort of pulling in other datasets, or others
>> knowing how they can use OSM data in their own.
>
> In my eyes this modular nonsense is actually the greatest problem with
> the CC licenses and I'm happy not to see it repeated here.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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