[OSM-legal-talk] OBbL and forks

[Matt Amos]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 11:14 PM, andrzej zaborowski <balrogg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

it's in that spirit, but it's also worth pointing out that we aren't
asking for copyright assignment or any other rights assignment. that's
a subtle, but often important difference.

cheers,

matt