[OSM-legal-talk] [Osmf-talk] New license proposal status II

[James Livingston]

On 03/12/2009, at 10:19 PM, Ed Avis wrote:
> That was my interpretation too.  It appears to me that if some well-meaning
> body released a set of data under the ODbL (which presumably we recommend as
> an appropriate licence for geodata) then the OSM project would not be able to
> use it.  In other words, under the proposed way of using it (with these
> contributor terms), the ODbL is not compatible with itself.

A somewhat similar situation happens with open-source software that is licensed "GPL 2 or later" - people can license their changes under "GPL 2 only", meaning they can't practically be used upstream. The difference is that doing so is an active thing, you are not likely to release your changes like that without knowing that you're doing it.

With the contributor terms however, you have to actively choose to make your data importable, rather than it being importable by default.


> The 'without giving up the ability for easy re-licensing' part is not a
> disadvantage of the ODbL or the proposed contributor terms; it applies to any
> licence.  (Currently, data released under CC-BY-SA can be imported into OSM,
> but the project doesn't have the right to relicense it without separate
> permission.)

I probably could have left out the references to the ODbL in my mail.


> However, if the policy is that no data (ODbL or otherwise) can be imported
> without agreement to contributor terms that allow broad relicensing, then in
> practice data derived from the OSM data cannot be merged back in without
> special permission.  This does seem to defeat most of the point of share-
> alike licensing.  (The data set may be available, but without permission to
> reincorporate it into OSM, it becomes much less useful.)

This is the main point of what I was getting at. We'll have to see what the LWG thinks, but as I read it the proposed contributor terms defeat the main point of choosing a share-alike license: that we can benefit from when a derived database contains some useful information.