[OSM-legal-talk] Contributor Terms review

[Lars Aronsson]

On 08/27/2010 08:53 AM, Francis Davey wrote:
> [2] All a lawyer can properly do is convert what the client (or
> parties) want into a legal document. All too often clients ask lawyers
> to draft contracts for them without realising that they have to decide
> what the contract is going to say, before the lawyer can draft it.

This is true, but it's also true that what OSM wants is to have
"something as similar as possible to GPL, but applied to maps".
For a while we thought CC-BY-SA was that, but turns out it
builds on copyright and we can't trust copyright to apply
to the data in OSM. So if copyright is failing us, other available
tools (including database rights and contract law) must be
considered and neither OSMers nor lawyers have much
experience from applying these legal tools to maps. This
inexperience has two consequences: Directly, we're not sure
if ODbL will "function like GPL" for us in future legal battles.
Indirectly, since ODbL is new, unfamiliar and untested, we
will have a hard time to convince volunteers and authorities
to contribute their data.

When Wikipedia started in 2001, well before Creative Commons
was set up, they wanted "something as similar as possible
to GPL, but applied to an online encyclopedia". The suggestion
to use GFDL resonated perfectly well with the community,
but later turned out to be a mistake, since GFDL required
any reusers to list many of the participating authors, resulting
in some very peculiar examples, such as the German printed
one-volume encyclopedic dictionary (Das Wikipedia Lexikon
in einem Band) which spends dozens of its 1000 pages on
listing Wikipedia user names in a tiny, tiny font. This is not
what the community had intended. Since GFDL v.2 allowed
a transition to a version 3, its creator Richard Stallman was
convinced to make GFDL v.3 equivalent with CC-BY-SA, and
that is now what Wikipedia uses.

That Wikipedia's choice of GFDL turned out to be a mistake
was not all that important. In the beginning it did have the
more important resonating effect that got the whole project
started. Even if it wasn't entirely solid, it looked like a good
plan, and attracted many early volunteers from the free
software community. This is also what CC-BY-SA has brought
to OSM. But can ODbL sustain that effect, or just kill it?

This attraction of volunteers is an important aspect of being
"something similar to GPL".


-- 
   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se