[OSM-legal-talk] License Telephone Debate

[Gervase Markham]

On 16/03/09 00:26, Russ Nelson wrote:
> 1) Because ODbL 1.0 is better than  C-By-SA

Taking ODbL 0.9 instead of 1.0, I think that's at least debatable, given 
the issues raised by the ITO lawyer and others. CC-by-SA may have loads 
of potential issues, but the project seems to be chugging along fairly 
happily. E.g. people credit "OpenStreetMap", even though that's 
technically not what CC-BY-SA requires, and the world continues to spin 
on its axis. (Of course, you can't see stuff that isn't happening that 
otherwise would be, I know that.)

Believe me, I'm all for fixing licensing problems. I spend a lot of time 
doing it, and I ran to completion the biggest (as far as I know) open 
source relicensing project ever. So you know I don't have a cavalier 
attitude to these things. But relicensing Mozilla required contacting 
450 people, and it took 5 years (part time). OSM has two orders of 
magnitude more contributors than that. So I think I have good reason to 
be trepidatious about needing to contact them all any more than once, or 
of presenting them with a choice that has anything more than the minimum 
possible doubt and concern attached to it.

> 2) Because it's not clear that we'll understand ODbL any time soon
> well enough to fix any problems.

So the sales pitch to people concerned is "yeah, the new licence has 
known problems and we don't understand it properly so it has unknown 
ones too. But it'll all probably get fixed eventually"?

Gerv