[OSM-legal-talk] decision removing data

[80n]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 9:58 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Liz,
>
>
>  Since 80n has mooted this deadline some time ago, and only now you
>> consider it, of course you think it is quite short.
>>
>
> 80n first mentioned this deadline on 14th July, i.e. at the time that was
> six weeks.
>
> It was unclear to me what exactly the deadline was about; he wrote "if
> there isn't a clear majority by September 1st then I'd say the relicensing
> has failed" but a majority of whom, in what question?
>
> The thread you refer to was a discussion of when (or whether) the licence
change would be put to a vote by the whole community.  The alternative was
that there would never be a vote, but instead a process of gradual erosion.
That would clearly be very underhand.

As for how to measure the majority - that's not defined and it doesn't
really matter.  It just needs to be compelling.


> Did anybody - you, 80n, anybody? - think that we'd somehow, in these six
> weeks, be able to email every contributor, and ask them to relicense their
> content, chase up those that don't answer, and consolidate the results? -
> Personally I didn't even think about that deadline becasue it seemed quite
> absurd.
>

The process was started on May 12th.  Three months is not at all
unreasonable.


>
> Plus, I don't know if we need any kind of deadline at all.
>
> Lack of a deadline will allow this dreadful process to drag on
indefinitely.  This is not a reasonable burden to impose on this project.



> We can simply decide to re-license, then ask everyone to agree, then
> disallow contributions from people who haven't agreed. All the time, the
> planet is still under CC-BY-SA. Then we evaluate the losses. Say we find
> that 20% of data has not been relicensed. Ok, we start working on replacing
> that data, using the work of people who are ok with ODbL. After a while,
> only 10% of "old" data is still there. We continue, with the planet still
> under CC-BY-SA. After another while, we have brought down the losses to 1%,
> or 0.1%, or whatever. At that time we throw out the rest and publish the
> planet under ODbL.
>
> Who cares if that time is one year in the future? If it helps to keep our
> losses to a minimum - why not.
>

Prolonging this process is damaging to the project.  The license is the one
area where commercial organizations that are threatened by OSM can and will
attack it.  The threat and uncertainty surrounding ODbL and the contributor
terms in particular are a very attractive and easy target.



>
> As you know we have many people who don't fear the license change, but they
> fear data loss incurred by people not agreeing. In theory, the LWG could
> even set an arbitrary limit (e.g. "we promise not to re-license the planet
> until global data loss is less than x%"). That should then bring all those
> people on board who fear data loss. Then we just carry on as I described
> above, slowly eliminating the "old" data by replacing it with re-surveyed
> "new" data until we achieve what we want.
>
> Just a thought. Not necessarily bright. Might have its problems, might also
> work.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
>
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