[OSM-legal-talk] OBbL and forks

[andrzej zaborowski]

2009/12/8 Matt Amos <zerebubuth at gmail.com>:
> On Tuesday, December 8, 2009, Anthony <osm at inbox.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 7:40 AM,  <mapping at sheerman-chase.org.uk <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'mapping at sheerman-chase.org.uk');>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> A quick question for the legal people: does ODbL allow the project to
>> be forked?
>>
>> Technically, it does.  But remember that the OSMF is granted a special license in addition to the ODbL.  Any fork would be at a major disadvantage as it wouldn't have that special license.
>
> Yes, because the osmf has a direct relationship with the contributors,
> and any fork wouldn't. This is similar to the fsf, which asks its
> contributors to assign copyright, giving it rights that any fork
> purely under the GPL doesn't have.

Right, so this is one thing that isn't being made so clear.  It's been
said multiple times that the ODbL transition in summary is the spirit
of CC-By-SA taken and made into a proper license for a database.  But
actually it's the spirit of CC-By-SA + copyright assignment, like that
of Mozilla and others, which makes a difference.

Cheers