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

[James Livingston]

On 27/08/2010, at 1:36 AM, Anthony wrote:
> 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."

Sure, except I don't know that will really help. If people want certainty that all future licenses will have certain conditions, then presumably they'd want that in legal form, i.e. in the contributor terms.


> 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.

I agree.


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

I meant "we" as a community don't know what we'll need in future to reflect out wants. Various groups of people have opinions on that, but I don't think that we can say the OSM community agrees on what we want to happen in 5 or 10 years.


> 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.

+1.

If we want the ability to relicense to fix problems, ODbL's upgrade clause should (I would hope) be enough. If we want the ability to do a relicense other than to fix problems, we're probably not going to want to be bound by what it contains.


>> 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.


If you could successfully argue that, couldn't just as easily argue that it would allow a change to one that doesn't require Derived Databases to be under the same license? That is what I assume most people want a "share alike" requirement to actually mean.