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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

SteveC wrote:
> I agree that the authors and groups who built the GPL need to  
> understand it, at least to the degree possible with no training in  
> law, but do I as a user and contributor to GNU/LINUX need to? That I  
> thought was the point?

Ideally I would expect that someone who puts his project under GPL has 
thought about what he wants to achieve and made a conscious decision 
that GPL is the best way to get there.

But the GPL is so widely used already, and GPL users come under such 
scrutiny, that I can afford to let examples guide me through GPL. I can, 
for example, be reasonably sure that the GPL does *not* require me to 
ship my code on CD-ROM to remote parts of Africa and pay the shipping 
cost, because if it were so, lots of projects would have been crushed 
already and this would be public knowledge. In the same vein, I can 
watch existing GPL usage patterns and decide that my project fits in 
there ("I want exactly the same as X").

This is not the case with ODbL. If OSM should approve the ODbL then we 
would be the first big user of that license. If our users come asking 
"can we do X", we can't say "just look what all the others do". And 
neither can we say "dunno, ask a lawyer" without looking really really 
stupid ("so you guys went through this tremendous relicensing effort, 
lost an arm and a leg in the process, and you don't even know what you 
did it for?").

Bye
Frederik

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