[OSM-legal-talk] Suggestion for resolving PD/SA issue

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    it occurs to me that we have two things mixed up here.

We have a PD community with renewed energy who initially talked about 
starting some kind of OSM/PD that would share data with OSM wherever 
possible, accepting that OSM proper won't go PD.

They were then told in rather unpolite terms to go away because "OSM is 
not going to go PD ever". (Which was't even what they suggested.)

This led to them now questioning why OSM should not go PD, and what 
would be required to do that.

Which painfully interferes with the re-licensing process that had just 
been revived after a half-year lull (with the majority of the "new" PD 
people not even having followed how this whole process came about and 
what was done in the last two years).

My suggestion is this:

1. Let us - the "powers that be" in the project - accept that there are 
people who want (some of) OSM in the public domain, and let us accept 
that, where contributors are ok with this, this is a valid concern. Let 
us not stigmatize this concern and tell them to find their own place to 
run their own project; let us create an OSM mailing list where, in the 
future, we investigate the possibility to give OSM contributors the 
option to dual-license their data, so that - to the extent permissible 
by licensing - there might be a subset of OSM that is actually PD 
because the contributors wanted it. Whether or not this turns out to 
work is a completely different question - I am not saying we should 
allocate any resources or make any promises, just set up the mailing 
list and accept that OSM/PD is a topic worth discussing INSIDE our project.

2. In return for this "inclusive" act, let us - those that would rather 
like to see OSM go PD as a whole - hold back this discussion for at 
least as long as the re-licensing process is finished and OSM is under 
ODbl/FIL. Let us accept that the ODbL/FIL is a workable compromise and, 
at any rate, something better than the CC-BY-SA we have now. Let us 
concentrate forces on how we can make OSM an inclusive platform that, 
while generally being share-alike licensed, also opens avenues for 
contributors to dedicate things to be PD and users to extract such data 
if they want, even if that means that the PD stock will always just be a 
lesser-quality subset of the whole of OSM.

To end this with a Peter Miller-esque phrase: Does that make sense?

Bye
Frederik

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