[OSM-legal-talk] Making OSM Public domain

[Philipp Klaus Krause]

A Morris schrieb:
> On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 12:36 AM, Joseph Gentle <josephg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Some people have different ideas of what 'free' should mean for our maps.
>>
>> Do you prefer that we:
>> (o)  Place no restrictions on the use of the map data [link to PD stuff]
>> (o)  Force anyone using maps based on OpenStreetMaps to share their
>> improvements back to the community [link to SA stuff]
>>
> 
> How about the following wording:
> 
> Do you prefer to:
> (o) Allow satnav hardware manufacturers to wrap your data in DRM such
> that any users (including yourself) must pay to get updates [link to
> Tivo stuff]?
> (o) Ensure that users of the data contribute back any improvements they make.
> 
> or maybe:
> 
> Do you prefer to:
> (o) Allow third parties to add proprietary extensions to your data so
> that OSM will always be inferior to commercial alternatives [link to
> Wine/Codeweavers stuff?
> (o) Ensure that users of the data contribute back any improvements they make.

How about:

Do you prefer to:

(o) Allow everyone to use your data freely
(o) Lock out all the various other free data and software communitites
that use their own licenses from using your data, making your data
useless to people that would want to use it in their free GPL, CC-BY-SA,
etc projects?

Copyleft/share-alike seemed like a good idea to me for a long time.
However the large number of incompatible licenses like GPLv2 only,
GPLv3, CC-BY-SA fragment the free software/data/etc community and
everyone has to reinvent the wheel since the existing free stuff they
would like build upon is locked away from them by licenses that claim to
protect freedom.

Philipp