[OSM-legal-talk] Privacy and Terms

Mike Collinson mike at ayeltd.biz
Sun Jun 28 15:53:19 BST 2009


At 03:57 PM 26/06/2009, Peter Miller wrote:
>My concern here is to try to avoid creating an interesting target for  
>'carpet baggers' who may wish to 'privatise' OSM in the way that the  
>mutual building societies were privatised in the past ten years in the  
>UK.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_baggers#United_Kingdom
>
>I suggest that we need to infuse all the legal arrangements with  
>efforts to:
>1) Avoid the OSMF being valuable as a 'take over' target with a  
>potential financial value on the open market. Both the articles and  
>the terms and conditions should help with this.
>2) To protect the OSMF from hostile actions by excluding opportunities  
>of financial reward to any parties (members, directors or  
>contributors). Both the terms and conditions and articles should help  
>with this.

Peter,

We think we have come up with up with a very robust and elegant way of dealing with this by binding the Foundation when individual contributors make their contributions, see item 3 of:.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Contributor_Terms#OpenStreetMap_Contributor_Terms

(this text has just gone up on the wiki and there will be a general announcement about it to this list).

This should be stronger than amending the Foundation's articles as the articles themselves are can be changed in an adverse takeover.  It does not preclude tightening the articles and I personally feel we should.  For propriety, we feel that the make-up of the Articles Working Group should be different from the License group.

Comments welcome and appreciated.

Mike
License Working Group 






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