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

[Anthony]

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 4:56 AM, James Livingston
<lists at sunsetutopia.com> wrote:
> On 25/08/2010, at 5:41 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>> There is also a very practical reason against fixing anything, and *specifically* a share-alike requirement, in the CT, and that is that in order to make *clear* what you want you will have to write half a license into the CT.
>
> I completely agree - if you want to add a clause requiring that future licenses be "share alike"
> you'll need to come up with a good definition of what that means, and once you do you're
> probably made it impossible to relicense.

Or you could just assign the task of deciding what it means to
someone.  "Whether or not a future license is share alike shall be
determined by a vote of the OSMF board."

Yes, that means a future board could conceivably conspire to vote as
share alike a license which wasn't.  Of course they'd then need 2/3rds
of active contributors to conspire with them to pull off the rouse.

I highly doubt there are enough people in OSMF (and among the active
contributors) with such lack of integrity that a switch to a PD-like
license could occur under those conditions.

Another possibility is to assign the task of deciding what share alike
means to Creative Commons.  Of course, that isn't likely to work if
you want to go with the ODbL...

> The whole point of the relicensing clause is that we don't know what we'll need in the future.

Some people don't know.

Others do, at least, aside from fixes to the license which are
propagated by the originator of the license ("License X or any later
version").

With all the trust that's being put into ODC's lawyers, I'm surprised
there isn't more trust that "ODbL 1.0 or any later version published
by ODC" will be adequate.

Of course, some people are pushing for a relicensing clause because
they want PD, and don't actually want ODbL in the first place.

> Consider for example if OSM had originally had the CTs along with the CC-BY-SA license. I
> would argue strongly that we couldn't then re-license to ODbL under the CTs because ODbL's
> version of share-alike isn't what people would have assumed it meant when they signed up.

And you'd probably lose that argument (even though I'd agree with
you).  ODbL has been sold as a sharealike license from the get go, by
Steve, by the LWG, by the statements attached to the poll...  I was
surprised they got away with it, but they did.