[OSM-legal-talk] Who is ODC and why do we trust them?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    Grant wrote in his announcement:

"... Therefore, we have worked with the license authors and others to 
build a suitable home where a community and process can be built around 
it. Its new home is with the Open Data Commons 
http://www.opendatacommons.org."

In my opinion, the ODbL is a legal construct involving not only two, but 
three parties: the licensee, the licensor, and whoever has the power to 
decree that a certain license is "a later version of this license" or "a 
compatible license".

In the absence of any other statement on this topic, I assume that this 
entity is Open Data Commons, i.e. Open Data Commons has the completely 
unlimited freedom to change the ODbL as they see fit. For example, one 
day after OSM has made the switch to ODbL, Open Data Commons could 
announce version 1.1 of the ODbL which for all intents and purposes 
equals a BSD license, and OSM would be BSD licensed all of a sudden. I'm 
not saying they will, I'm just saying we grant them the power to.

I assume that the licensing working group has asked themselves the 
following questions, and has found reassuring answers to them:

* Who is "Open Data Commons"? What legal status do they have?

* How does the internal decision making structure of "Open Data Commons" 
work? Are there people, members, votes? Which law(s) are they governed by?

* 80n recently wrote that OSMF has around 200 members and that it would 
thus cost around £3,000 to "buy" OSMF. How much would it cost to buy 
Open Data Commons? (Or how many people would I have to photograph in 
compromising situations to get ODC to do my bidding?)

* What measures are in place to (a) reduce the danger of ODC being 
"hijacked" by someone hostile to OSM, and (b) make sure that, when 
needed, OSM has sufficient access to ODC to push for changes in the license?

* What happens if the people currently running Open Data Commons lose 
interest, or die?

These are honest questions. I know that Jordan Hatcher is involved with 
Open Data Commons and that somehow OKFN seems to come into the equation 
but the extent of my knowledge is not nearly good enough to simply sign 
over all of OSM to them, and until now the licensing working group has 
made no effort to explain why *they* trust ODC.

The December 23 board meeting minutes say: "No hosting option for the 
licence is currently available and therefore OSMF may need to host.", 
which suggests that the ODC/OKFN idea is a relatively young one. The 
same meeting minutes also reported that "all communications with Jordan 
[Hatcher] had broken down"; it is good to see that this seemed to be 
temporary, but still this does not exactly give the impression that the 
ODC/OKFN connection is a well-thought-out and future-proof thing. Sounds 
more like clutching at straws as far as I'm concerned.

Bye
Frederik