[OSM-legal-talk] Q&A with a lawyer

[Mikel Maron]

From: Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>

> The answer lies in 4.9 ("you may not sublicense the database"). We often 
> sloppily say that "if you make a derived work you must license it under 
> ODbL", but this is not the way ODbL is intended to work. The idea is 
> that the original licensor (OSMF) is the sole licensor throughout the 
> chain of use; and as such, only OSMF has all the rights of the licensor 
> (like defining the list of comptabile licenses).
> 
> This is very different from CC-BY-SA, where each time you make a derived 
> work and publish that, you are the licensee for upstream content and the 
> licensor for your derived work

This *seems* like a big problem in the ODbL, but maybe I misundertand. Is the ODbL non-transitive??

What if another entity, say some National Mapping Agency, licenses their data as ODbL?
It appears that if the NMA are the sole licensor, and the ODbL prevents transfer of the rights of sole licensor,
then OSM could not assume those rights, and not import the NMA data. 


-Mikel
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