[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL comments from Creative Commons

[John Wilbanks]

 > But open data is much more than just science and education. It's more 
 > than OSM; it's more than maps. The assiduous
 > how-late-is-my-sodding-train-today people on our town website, for
 > example, are creating a database that could potentially be licensed
 > openly.

Well put.

Then let's open up the license working group to science and education 
and OSM and more.

Then let's do a real analysis of the environmental impact of the license 
on other communities where the PD is already working and could be 
enclosed by an "open" database license.

Then let's have more than a short window of comment time.

But as far as I can tell, this is an OSM driven event. I don't know 
anyone outside OSM as a community rep that's on the working group. Yet 
it's being called an Open Database License for cross-community use.

We spent about three years working on this across a range of scientific 
disciplines. CC has analyzed it in the context of education and culture.

We came to the PD conclusion. OSM doesn't want to go PD - that's fine, 
in the end. But when you call the license written by and for a 
streetmapping community a solution for the rest of the world when the 
DBs and norms involved vary so much...well, it's odd to then get mad 
when the rest of the world comes in and comments on it.

Your community cares more about reciprocity than interoperability. 
That's fine and dandy for you. But you're proposing to promote your 
solution, a complex one engineered and tuned for you, as something that 
is a generic solution *without doing the research* as to how it will 
work in generic situations. That's not fine and dandy.

I am unaware of a single community other than OSM looking at this 
license. I've asked OKF and got the null response. Does anyone here know 
of another? I'd really like to know.

Trust me, I have a lot of other things to do with my time. But as long 
as this license gets promoted as a generic solution for "open data" it 
gets debated inside science, and that has the direct consequence of 
enclosing the public domain in my space. My job is to prevent that. If 
the name could simply be changed I would have a lot less problems here...

jtw

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John Wilbanks

VP for Science, Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org
http://sciencecommons.org
http://neurocommons.org

"We make sharing easy, legal, and scalable."
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