[OSM-legal-talk] To calm some waters - about Section 3

[Simon Biber]

On Sun, 22 August, 2010 11:55:27 PM, Peteris Krisjanis <pecisk at gmail.com> wrote:

> As I'm interested in keeping my data within OSM and find a common ground with 
>rest of you, I'm delighted to see that requests to specify 'free and open 
>license' in CT section 3 has been taken into account[1]. Huge thanks and sorry 
>for any emotional storm it have caused.
> 
> [1] http://www.abalakov.com/?p=56


Now this has been changed again, seemingly to dilute the given assurance that 
the Contributor Terms will be amended to make clear that this refers to an 
attribution and share-alike license.

My reading of the changes means it now only says that some explanation will be 
made as to whether this refers to an attribution and/or share-alike license. 


I and many others need a firm commitment to ensure contributions continue to be 
protected by attribution and share-alike in the future.

Without that, if this license change goes ahead, my survey work over the past 
year, and that of many others, seems likely to be useless for OSM. This is both 
for a philosophical reason (I don't agree with the open-ended contributor terms) 
and for a practical reason (I have used aerial photography to confirm some 
positions, under an agreement that the resulting work could only be released 
under CC-BY-SA).

I want to contribute my mapping work to a community who will respect my wishes 
that the work remain free. This includes that no-one should be allowed to make a 
derived work and not allow others to have the same freedom over the derived 
work. This is the essence of what the FSF calls copyleft, and what CC calls 
share-alike. It's also what I assumed was one of the core beliefs of the OSM 
community, since the license at the time I signed up was explicitly a 
share-alike license, CC-BY-SA.

For that philosophical reason, I also agree with the stance of NearMap, which 
has publically said it cannot accept the current contributor terms, because they 
could allow derived work to be released under a non-share-alike licence without 
the agreement of the original authors.