[OSM-legal-talk] decision removing data

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Liz wrote:
> As you realise, in my jurisdiction, CC-by-SA is a better licence than ODbL,

Actually, to be quite honest, I have a hard time acquiring an educated 
view about licensing in my own jurisdiction so I'd rather not speculate 
about how things might be in Australia.

> A previous idea of yours was different licences for different areas, and this 
> has not been fully explored.

I still find that the idea has a certain charm to it; of course it would 
only work if data from different license domains would be completely 
separate - which wouldn't be too difficult if, say, all of Australia 
wanted a different license, but it would cause trouble if e.g. 
Switzerland wanted their own way.

The major downside of this would be that we'd be likely to see less 
world-wide uses of OSM data; lots of projects only being available for 
parts of the world. People would do things for their license domain 
which might not necessarily work in another; for example, something like 
the OpenCycleMap could be made with third-party "noncommercial" altitude 
data, and the tiles released under a NC license, for the ODbL domain, 
but regions with CC-BY-SA use would have to be excluded.

Today, most projects start small - someone does something for their city 
or country - and then expand to continent or world-wide coverage. Having 
different licenses for different regions might make that more difficult 
or at least require more planning.

Certainly nothing that could be sorted out within a few weeks. And, most 
importantly, something that can *still* be thought about if we find, 
after people have had their chance to agree or not agree with the new 
license, that data loss in certain regions would be too painful. If the 
re-licensing goes ahead as planned, and at some time in the future we 
find that we've got 99% relicensed in most parts of the world but only 
50% in Australia, I think it is safe to assume that solutions would be 
found.

I'm however very sympathetic with the LWG when they say: Let's *first* 
get on with the re-licensing and *then* look at the problematic cases 
and solve them, rather than try and solve every single potentially 
problematic case beforehand, based on speculative approval or 
disapproval numbers.

There seems to be a feeling with many contributors that they're being 
fast-tracked into something and once they say yes they can never go back 
and their "yes" will spell doom on OSM in their region. I urge everyone 
to understand that this is meant to be a benign process. Nobody's trying 
to break anything. If a data loss due to license change in any region 
would be too big, solutions will be found and implemented. We're a 
creative bunch of people. Nobody wants the map speckled with white deserts.

After everyone has relicensed or not relicensed, we have ample time to 
assess the situation and deal with it - BEFORE we actually change the 
license on the database and have to stop handing out non-relicensed 
data. We can, and will, use that time to make sure the process is as 
painless as possible - all of us.

Setting deadlines, in my eyes, doesn't really help.

Bye
Frederik

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