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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

John Wilbanks wrote:
> 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".

To back this up, here's a 1.5 years old blog entry from John Wilbanks 
about SC working on data licensing (or not licensing):

http://network.nature.com/people/wilbanks/blog/2007/12/17/open-access-data-boring-but-important

It neatly tells the story how they set out to clarify what the CC 
licenses meant for data, then found that something like a share-alike 
element was difficult to implement and thought "ok let's go for 
attribution at least", and in the end felt compelled to even drop that.

Whether one agrees to their conclusion or not, I am tempted to believe 
that, initially, they really wanted their existing set of CC licenses to 
work for data, and the whole development from there to the current "Open 
Access Data Protocol" (which is, bluntly speaking, PD with a moral 
component) is simply the result of reality-testing their wishful thinking.

Bye
Frederik

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