[OSM-legal-talk] Is CC-BY-SA is compatible with ODbL - a philosophical point

[Ed Avis]

andrzej zaborowski <balrogg at ...> writes:

>That's what I think the plan is.  However it is made very difficult by
>the fact that those data providers most likely chose their SA licenses
>in order to be able to use any improvements made on top of their data,
>which we are planning to very soon make impossible for them.  So we
>now approach them and say "Hello, can you please grant all these..
>perpetual.. irrevocable.. etc. rights to something called OSMF, and by
>the way you won't be able to use OSM data any more because our new
>license is not compatible with yours".

Agreed.  If we are encouraging others to open up their data, we need to lead
by example and be open with ours.  There is a lot of discussion on this list
about whether licence X is compatible to allow us to take data into the project,
but very little about what this project can do to let our data be used by
others.

Now, ODbL allows a list of compatible licences.  We could quite straightforwardly
add CC-BY-SA as such a licence to allow sharing back of data under the normal
share-alike terms.  (If somebody used that licence and distributed their work
under CC-BY-SA, we could not import it back into OSM, but that is the case under
the proposed contributor terms too, even if the other party used the ODbL.)

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>