[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] License to kill

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

SteveC wrote:
> Where to begin?

Same question here when trying to respond to your post. I wish you had 
had the time it took you to compose this when we had questions for you 
over on  legal-talk.

I'll focus on one thing for now.

> Now lets turn to the board and the working group. They're volunteers..  
> but they haven't been doing their job! They've been slow! It took them  
> so, so *so* long to get things done... But hold on nobody has been  
> saying they could have done better... oh and we don't see any offers  
> of help.. or offers to be on the group. 

For a long time I thought that the license was actually being "worked 
on" on legal-talk. The very first time, ever, I heard of a "license 
working group" was on the 15th of January, 2009, when Mikel Maron wrote 
to legal-talk:

"Yesterday we held the first meeting of the Licensing working group. At 
the last Foundation Board meeting before the holidays, we decided to 
convene a working group to expedite the final process of moving OSM to 
the new license."

(Note: Mikel, who was not visibly involved in licensing until that time, 
suddenly wrote this. Later, Grant wrote in the name of the licensing 
working group, even though it is obvious from the Foundation 
documentation that they must have both been rather fresh to the topic, 
whereas you, who was in touch with the lawyers and even selected the 
legal counsel for OSMF, chose to keep quiet.)

Nobody ever asked who wanted to be on the group; I am 100% sure that 
there would have been serious interest from some on legal-talk. 
Convening a license working group without asking those who until then 
had been most active in thinking about the license sounded like "we 
don't want you here". Maybe it was that, maybe it was just bad community 
communication.

Maybe the following item from the meeting minutes of the same Foundation 
Board meeting sheds some light on the roots of this communication style:

"Steve reluctant to publish publicly as it would invite another round of 
changes."

Blimey, if you talk to people, they might have ideas and suggestions or 
even want to CHANGE something. Better keep things to yourself and 
complain later.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"