[OSM-legal-talk] reciprocal data agreements

Matt Amos zerebubuth at gmail.com
Wed Oct 7 15:36:08 BST 2009


On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 6:50 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Richard,
>
> Richard Weait wrote:
>> Imagine a data provider using perhaps cc-by, or a BSD style permissive
>> license contributes their data to OSM.
>> Imagine then that they would like to monitor changes in OSM to data
>> that originated from their source.
>> Imagine then that they would like to incorporate those changes, with
>> or without further vetting, back into their dataset under their
>> license.
>
> I agree that this would be very desirable; however it would allow our
> sacred data to leave the protecting cage of ODbL and live on under a
> CC-BY-SA or, God forbid, a BSD license which would be unpalatable to
> many contributors.

if they've got balls of steel, they could just claim that CC BY-SA
doesn't apply to factual data and just take the current OSM data ;-)

on a more serious note, this is very much like the Biba model. if we
order licenses by property: BY-SA, BY, 0, then it follows a
write-down, read-up model. in other words, even if we had a BSD type
license, our data could be incorporated into BY-SA projects, but not
into PD projects. the only way to become a universal donor also means
rejecting non-PD imports.

personally, i think that imports are bad, m'kay? so i'm not that bothered ;-)

cheers,

matt




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