[OSM-legal-talk] An updated 'brief brief' for the new licence

[Rob Myers]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 8:27 AM, Peter Miller <peter.miller at itoworld.com> wrote:

> Also, as I mentioned before, the intention of this licence initiative is to
> produce a licence that keeps to the spirit of the original ccbysa licence
> but works for us to protect the data, but frees up how that data is used.

Isn't this what the new data licence will do?

> 2) Ensure that if people use the OSM dataset (or a Derived Database) within
> any publically available work that they should attribute OSM in the
> resulting work appropriately for the medium, the space available and the
> relative significance of the OSM data to their final work.

This is adware rather than copyleft and will not help the users of
such systems to use the data freely as they encounter it.

> 3) It should allow people to do anything within reason they like with the
> OSM dataset so long as they comply with 1) and 2).

This is potlatch, not openness.

> [Individual contributors will be acknowledged on the OSM website but not in
> the final end-used experience. Bulk contributors will be able to require a
> notice to be included in the OSM database if required by prior negotiation].

I'd recommend leaving out the prior negotiation part and just have
flat acknowledgement. Vanity is a terrible thing to work against. ;-)

- Rob.