[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] Community vs. Licensing

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Russ Nelson wrote:
> I've re-thought this, and I think that the proper course of action,
> which will do the least damage to the community, is to stay with
> CC-By-SA.

I think that this makes sense if you view it from one country alone. If you
are in the US and only concerned about the US community and the project in
the US, then that's fine - CC-By-SA is unlikely to work but hey, as you
correctly point out, share-alike is not cool anyway.

If you are in Germany and don't care for anywhere else, then CC-By-SA will
likely afford some protection there and that's fine too.

But as an international project, I think not having a harmonised license is
going to do damage to the community because it threatens the unity. Someone
in Germany might contribute data under CC-By-SA and be bound by it, and
someone in the US might extract that data as quasi-PD and to what he likes.
The guy in Germany cannot do the project he wants because of a license
restriction, and the guy in the US can do the very same project with no
trouble. 

Rules are worst if they are only valid for some people and not others. With
a leaky license like the CC-By-SA, the project as a whole gets the worst of
both worlds, PD and share-alike.

If a conscious decision is taken by OSMF to abandon the relicensing process
in the full knowledge that CC-By-SA is effectively like PD in many parts of
the world, I would like OSMF to publicly declare that they do not consider
OSM to be a "share-alike" project any longer:

"The OpenStreetMap Foundation has evaluated the applicability of the
CC-By-SA license to Geodata and has come to the conclusion that it is not
providing the desired attribution and share-alike protection in many
countries. The OpenStreetMap Foundation has suggested to OpenStreetMap to
use a better-suited license, ODbL, however this was rejected by too many
people in the community to be ignored. As a result, the project officiall
retains its CC-By-SA license. However, as the OpenStreetMap Foundation
considers this license unworkable, we wish to inform all project members
that their contributions to OSM are effectively unprotected, and under no
circumstances will OSMF take or even support any action against users of the
data who are seen to ignore the provisions of the CC-By-SA license."

When talking about OSM in public, we could henceforth drop the concept of
share-alike as central element of OSM, and instead add it as a footnote ("in
some countries of the world you might be required to ... if you want to use
OSM data").

OSMF would make a clear statement to stay out of any legal business between
an individual mapper and a data user that this mapper chooses to   sue for
breach of license. (Until this day, OSMF never took part in such legal
activity, indeed to my knowledge it has never happened at all, so this would
not change anything. But until now the OSMF claimed that OSM was a
share-alike project so if someone sued for share-alike they could at least
point to that statement to support their cause, whereas in the future OSMF
would actively reject giving such support.)

The worst thing that could happen is the license change failing and OSMF
afterwards pretending that we were still a share-alike project.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.22' E008°24.56'