[OSM-legal-talk] decision removing data
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Thu Aug 5 01:12:33 BST 2010
Hi,
John Smith wrote:
> I'm guessing those that are more pragmatic and would like to be not
> redoing 20% or more of the work already mapped so they fork and move
> on with their lives under a different project
Which is perfectly legal, and personally I would actually encourage
that. OSMF will probably neither have the resources nor any interest in
keeping a parallel CC-BY-SA world, with planet dumps and tiles and all,
available after the license change. They will make a full history dump
available all right but that's not so easy to handle for everyone. So if
some people were to properly plan and set up a CC-BY-SA database after
OSMF made the switch, all the better for everyone. I would certainly use
it from time to time.
There are some issues involved in doing that properly, e.g. one might
want to devise a mechanism by which people could re-claim their username
in the forked CC-BY-SA database (which is unlikely to have access to the
OSM user database), and things like that. These issues should be
properly planned and openly discussed by those interested in keeping a
CC-BY-SA version of OSM alive.
Some people seem to think that such a fork is evil; some seem to even
use it as a threat ("and if I don't get what I want, then... then...
then... I'll FORK THE PROJECT!!!!"). But I don't view it that way. One
is always best at doing what one likes, and continuing in an environment
which one doesn't like is not only bad for oneself but also bad for that
environment. So if one is unhappy with how things go in OSM, and feels
it cannot be changed, forking and making it better is really the
positive, constructive choice - where one can use one's energy to build
something one likes rather than to ruin something one doesn't.
I'd only hope that everyone who wants to do a CC-BY-SA fork would work
together so that we don't end up with 10 of them.
Also, there's no reason to wait with the fork until some later date in
the license change process. Indeed, some people are even today holding
back on edits which are based on sources that might not be ODbL
compatible - because they fear it would all be for nothing. If they'd be
given the chance to contribute their stuff to a purely CC-BY-SA fork
then perhaps they would.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frederik at remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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