[OSM-legal-talk] Licence brief/Use Case - final call forcomments

[MJ Ray]

"Peter Miller" <peter.miller at itoworld.com> wrote:
[changeset supply with products and machine-readability]
> I have updated the wording. Is it any better?

I fished
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Open_Data_License#A_brief_for_the_proposed_licence
out of a browser history.  I think it deals with the product case. I
still think it permits the undesirable "human-readable change listing
with a machine-readable original" situation.

> > 2) What is "similar"?  Is this a backdoor?
>
> The concept of similar comes from the Debian licence and also appears in the
> ODBL licence.

What's "The Debian licence"?  I'm a debian developer who compiled the
listing at http://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/ and I've not heard of
it...  we try pretty hard to avoid writing licences.

> It is important that the licence can be updated without asking
> everyone for permission again, but it is unclear at present who would do
> that and how. The phrase 'or similar' is something that the legal boys will
> have to think about.

Yeah, I know this problem - the debian project only just relicensed
the main logo, which took years with only one copyright holder, and
still the debian web pages need a licence update.

I'd be inclined to delegate licence updates to OSMF in a similar way
to many people use "version 2 or later" on the GPL to delegate updates
to the FSF, although fewer people do that since GPLv3.

> > 5) Whose "fair-use" rules?  The USA's?  The pretty-minor UK ones?
>
> I have noted your point at the appropriate location.

"in which country is this licence being interpreted?" should not be
used to add a Choice of Venue (which can require significant travel
costs to defend a minor action) to the licence.

Hope that helps,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
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