[OSM-legal-talk] OBbL and forks

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

2009/12/12 James Livingston <doctau at mac.com>:
> One of the claimed problems with CC-BY-SA was that users were worried that they could be sued by any contributor for copyright infringement.
>
> Aside from any "can the data have copyright rights" questions, if OSMF was to claim some copyright in the data then they're basically implying that other contributors do too, and anyone of us could sue users. Which I don't think is what they want.
>

I'm not sure if this was so bad, in the end this is like in most
opensource projects (those that don't require copyright assignment).
Of course contributions in OSM may be easier to make than code
contributions, but a project like Linux still has more contributors
(subjects owning copyright) than we have.  And those contributors have
been successfully suing those who broke the rules, e.g. Harald Welte
and his gpl-violations.org, without help from Linux Foundation.

>
>> Out of curiosity, could the license at all work if contributors didn't
>> have to assign copyright *nor* database rights?  Apart from the fact
>> that updating the license would require a new vote (or licensing under
>> ODbL v1+, similar to GPLv2+), but could that be done?
>
> As I understand it, contributors don't have to (and aren't being asked to) assign either of those rights in the "exclusive transfer" sense. We're giving OSMF non-exclusive permission to distribute our contributions under ODbL (and future licenses, etc.).

What if we didn't give it any special rights and be on par with
potential forks?  Maybe the February license change should try to do
one change at a time and people would be more happy to accept those
changes? (I probably would be more happy, it would also be easier for
me to convince the people whose CC-by-SA data I have imported, to
agree to ODbL too)

Cheers