[OSM-legal-talk] New license status

[Ulf Möller]

James Livingston schrieb:

> Something I just thought of that would probably be worth talking about  
> - how does the "active contributor" for voting, and other things, work  
> if (unfortunately) the project forks?

The forked project would be able to use the regular ODbL upgrade path (a 
"later version" of the ODbL or a "compatible license"), but not to vote 
for a different license.

This is similar to the situation with other open projects, for example 
the FSF could introduce new licenses for their projects, but forked 
projects have to work under the conditions of the GPL.

> 	(question) does the OSFM membership retain it's voting power over a  
> re-license for all derivative databases?

Only on the OSM database. The OSMF can't change the license on 
modifications by people who have no relation with it.

> A while later (> 3 months) OSM decides to relicense the db, perhaps to  
> ODbL 2.0.
> 	(question) what exactly defines _the_ geo-database of the the Project?
> 	(question) and following that, if someone was contributing to OSM  
> before the fork and FSM after it, do they get a vote on the re-license?

In my understanding they don't. This is an asymmetry, but I don't see 
any manageable way around it if we want to be able to change to a 
different license later. (And the ODbL is new and we'd be the first 
project to try it out, so I think we need a chance to switch to a 
different license in case anything goes wrong or some other future 
license turns out to be better.)

> 2) Some time after a re-license to ODbL, someone creates a derivative  
> database called EvilStreetMap. They continue to release the data in  
> accordance with the ODbL, but do not accept any outside contributors.
> 	(question) after waiting three months, who has voting rights over a  
> re-license of EvilStreetMap?

They can decide what to do with their modifications, but the OSM 
contributors have the right to vote on the licenses for the original 
database.