[OSM-legal-talk] Contributor Terms

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Ed Avis wrote:
>> ODbL, as fast as I understand, does not permit re-licensing, which means 
>> that even if you have other data that is ODbL licensed, you cannot 
>> upload it to OSM without express permission of the license holder.
> 
> But if OSM also adoped ODbL then no re-licensing would be necessary.
> Isn't this the whole point of copyleft or share-alike licensing?

My reading until now was that because ODbL gives the original licensor 
super cow powers (namely of determining which other licenses are deemed 
compatible), it must be avoided to pass on these super cow powers to 
evil people like me (Fred sets up free world database, licenses it ODbL 
with himself at the license root, imports full OSM database without 
asking anyone, then decrees under section 4.4.e that for his project, 
ODbL is compatible with PD, and this makes the OSM data PD.)

But please let someone from the license working group say something to 
this before I confuse everyone.

> The current wording of the page says that the OSMF can grant any
> licence they want as long as it is 'free' and 'open', which hardly
> rules out the above scenario.

Sh, don't say that too loud, it has taken us PD advocates a lot of work 
to sneak that bit in!

Bye
Frederik