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

[80n]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 1:26 PM, James Livingston <doctau at mac.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
This issue was raised some months ago and considered by the LWG.  It's point
15 in this document: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dd9g3qjp_0hnnw6tc9

As far as I can see it remains unresolved.

80n
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