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

[James Livingston]

On 23/08/2010, at 6:54 PM, Jukka Rahkonen wrote:
> It may be hard to give something back from OSM to many of the data 
> providers. Public domain sources like USGS cannot take the updates 
> because they are funded for producing public domain data 
> (http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2010-July/020016.html). 
> Ordance Survey can't take updates because it is also selling licenses 
> for commercial use. Thus both the European and American mapping agencies 
> have one thing in common, they can't accept updates from OSM community 
> but they need to build their own community feed back systems.

That's going to be a problem no matter what license anyone picks, us or them. The only way that you can have free two-way reuse is for both parties to 1) use exactly the same licence, or 2) for both parties not constrain the licensing on derived works.

(1) isn't feasible because we would want that reuse with multiple parties and that would mean every single group we want to share data with would have to use the same license. Various companies and governments around the world aren't going to use exactly the same licence because the legal environment is different.

(2) isn't going to happen because that would mean everyone essentially saying that their work can be re-licensed by any to an license that choose.

One group requires attribution (e.g. the ABS) and one group can't require it (USGS), no matter what we do, we can't have two-way reuse with both those parties.