[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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