[OSM-legal-talk] License Telephone Debate

[Russ Nelson]

On Mar 16, 2009, at 6:47 PM, Gervase Markham wrote:

> 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,

Of course.  I'm saying that when we adopt ODbL when it's published,  
we'll do so because it's better than CC-By-SA.  And if it isn't, then  
we'll go looking elsewhere.  I'm not saying that ODbL is, a priori,  
better than CC-By-SA.  But I *am* saying that we should adopt a  
license which is better than CC-By-SA even if the license we adopt is  
not perfect.

> CC-by-SA may have loads of potential issues,

They're only potential issues until the shit hits the fan.  Then the  
recriminations about "Why didn't you switch to a different license if  
you knew the problems were so bad" start.
>
>> 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"?


No, it's "yeah, the new license is better than the old one."  The best  
is the enemy of the good.  Just because we can conceive of a perfect  
license doesn't mean we can write one.

--
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