[OSM-legal-talk] License Telephone Debate

[Russ Nelson]

On Mar 16, 2009, at 4:49 AM, 80n wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 1:16 AM, Russ Nelson <russ at cloudmade.com>  
> wrote:
>
> We didn't understand the negative aspects of the CC-By-SA, but we used
> *it*.  Are you saying that OSM shouldn't have been licensed at all,
> because at the time the licensing decision was made, people didn't
> understand exactly how it would work?
>
> Are arguing that we should then make the same mistake twice?

No, I'm saying that sober people looked at the license and given their  
current understanding, thought it was the best choice.  We shouldn't  
let the fact that we'll be smarter in the future delay us from making  
the best decision now, just as they didn't let the fact that we're  
smarter now from making that decision then.

There seems to be a lot of emotion here, but if cost(CC-By-SA) >  
cost(ODbL) + cost(switching), then we should switch even if we know  
that in the future we'll be evaluating cost(ODbL 1.0) against  
cost(ODbL 1.1) + cost(switching).  This should be obvious, no?  So why  
do we need to have a discussion about it?

> ODbL is more complex than CC-BY-SA in many way (copyright *and*  
> database rights *and* contract law) and it is completely untested.


EVERY open source contract is a unilateral contract ("contract of  
adhesion") which relies on copyright law for its teeth.  So, the ODbL  
introduces database rights ... but only because we've already seen  
that CC-By-SA doesn't work..  YES, there are risks, but YES there are  
risks of the status quo.  The trouble here is that people are not very  
good at evaluating the risk of an unlikely event with bad  
consequences.  Expect irrationality.

--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
russ at cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson