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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

80n wrote:
> An ODbL fork would not have same rights to the data as OSMF would have.  
> It would be a somewhat asymmetrical fork.  You cannot fork the substance 
> of the contributor terms.

True, but I believe this discussion was about whether you can fork the 
future ODbL OSM without having to ask OSMF, and the answer is yes.

If the community chooses to exercise clause 3 of the contributor terms 
and change the license from ODbL to something else, that something else 
must be "free and open". It is probably open to interpretation whether 
"free and open" implies "freely forkable" but I have yet to see a 
license that is free and open but does not allow forks,

What you can *not* do is fork the project, let yourself and two friends 
be the "community" in the new fork and then decide to relicense to 
public domain ("but two thirds of the community have agreed, we're only 
using clause 3 of the contributor terms!").

I think that most people would say that's a feature, not a problem.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"