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

John Wilbanks wilbanks at creativecommons.org
Wed Mar 25 18:58:38 GMT 2009


 >>>>>>
Steve wrote:

John I would assert that you're more worried about perceived
competition for your licenses
 >>>>>>

JTW says:

If this were the case, we'd have taken in the ODbL, or we'd have written 
something like it. With CC's position in the licensing space it'd have 
been quickly adopted - people have been pressing me to get a database 
license out for five years.

This would be so much easier than arguing for "no licenses" that I wish 
it were true. Gad, I'd love to have something to recommend rather than 
"give it all away and make it really free".

 >>>>>>
Steve wrote:

and that there are people out there who
want to be able to keep attribution and share-alike. I appreciate that
you're trying to stop people opening pandoras box and shoe horn the
cornucopia of people who might want a database license in to the PDDL
before they can figure out there are other options... but ultimately
it's not going to work. Someone else, somewhere will try to do another
ODbL even if you succeed stopping this one and ultimately people will
use it.
 >>>>>>

JTW says:

This is deeply true and well taken. But as I've always tried to note, my 
job is to try and fight for the public domain in the sciences, and the 
existence of these licenses is a threat simply by the opening of the box 
(and Steve - thank you for this comment and appreciation. Seriously).

Thus, I have to try to push the rock up the hill, however Sisyphean the 
task. Just because it's hard doesn't make it pointless. Unlike software, 
there is not a governing set of laws that require us to apply the ideas 
of property to create openness, and unlike software, the ideas of 
property may well hurt our task. Time will tell.

I think OSM is a good community. I believe you've given me a good 
hearing, for which I thank you. And I accept that you've made the 
decision that you want SA. Based on a lengthy back and forth with Rufus 
and Jordan this morning, I'm going to take my high level issues with the 
license back to the okfn-list, and I'll keep lurking here but only to 
watch and answer questions.

 >>>>>>
Steve wrote:

The simplest use case I can think of are all the companies who have
datasets that they're be happy with something like BY-SA but would
never release anything under PDDL. It's not going to fly to just tell
them all that they 'should' release things in to the public domain.
 >>>>>>

This is true, and is fine for them. It just makes that data 
significantly less interoperable.

I believe that many communities will come along and re-open that 
Pandora's Box, encode their own versions of share-alike, and we won't be 
able to put the data together. I hope I'm wrong, and the nice thing is 
that we'll have data in a few years to tell us the outcome.

jtw




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