[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL: incompatibility issues

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Peter Miller wrote:
> When we find an issue like this then lets document it on the wiki and 
> move on to the next topic. 

If we move too quickly then the importance of the topic may not be 
understood by many, and the Wiki page later brushed aside as "minor 
issues". I would like, for each topic, to at least have a number of 
people who say "yes this is a real concern and without clarification we 
cannot possibly move on" before we shelve it on the Wiki.

Frankly, I am also skeptical of this process because there have been a 
number of these questions up on the Use Case page for months and it was 
clear that these were important topics, nonetheless the legal counsel's 
answer was along the lines of "I don't really know, I need more 
details", and the license working group chose to go ahead with the 
process instead of first settling these issues. Even today we have no 
information from the legal working group whether anyone actually made, 
or plans to make, an effort to explain these issues to the legal counsel!

To me, this is an indication of the license working group not caring for 
what is on the Wiki, and I fear that our important topics we now 
document on the Wiki will receive the same kind of treatment. One day 
they'll simply start a vote and we'll go "wait a minute, what about the 
unresolved issues on the Wiki" and they'll say "oops we overlooked 
that/thought it was not important/think we can fix it later/thought you 
had found the solution on the mailing list/forwarded it to Jordan but 
got no reply", whatever.

> We have identified at least two so far, 1) 
> When is a 'DB and derived DB' and now 'what licensing applies to 
> Produced Works and how does the 'no reverse engineering' clause work 
> with PD images.

Not with PD images; because PD images don't care what restrictions you 
slap onto them. The problem arises when we want to combine "no reverse 
engineering" with another share-alike source (because unlike PD they all 
say "no additional restrictions allowed").

Bye
Frederik