[OSM-legal-talk] CT clarification: third-party sources

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

pecisk at gmail.com wrote:
> Don't want to argue but it is what confuses me - from one side, you
> accept that data is published under ODbL which is attribution/share
> alike, but you can't request to keep this clauses in the future. If
> that's a story, then it is not fully explained to community.

ODbL has lots of properties - it is a contract, a license, it is 
share-alike (according to some definitions!), it is free and open, it is 
maintained by an institution in England, it is based (in part) on 
database right, it does not cover patents...

If a future license change should be deemed necessary by 2/3 of the 
active mappers according to CT, they will choose a suitable replacement. 
The CT says that the "free and open" property must be kept. The others 
need not be kept.

It makes sense for the CT to list the required properties of the 
potential new license, instead of listing those that ODbL has but which 
are not required of the new license, or else the CT would become too long.

If you think that some people do not fully understand section three of 
the contributor terms - namely that *any* free and open license can be 
choosen by 2/3 of the active mappers - then maybe the contributor terms 
need in fact be made more explicit. I would however not recommend to put 
something in there that says:

"For the avoidance of doubt, such license does not necessarily have to 
have what, at the time of writing this agreement, is known as an 
'attribution' or 'share alike' clause"

because that would unnecessarily upset people; they would think there's 
a secret plan to go PD at the next possible opportunity, when in fact 
the non-requirement of share-alike is more something that gives us 
greater flexibility for the future. Personally I'd expect any future 
license to be something similar to ODbL which is share alike at the 
core, but makes some exceptions where things are deemed unimportant. Any 
such license would probably not pass a strict "... must have a share 
alike clause ..." unless one was being cheeky and saying that "having a 
share-alike clause" is already fulfilled by a license that has a clause 
regulating the effect of share-alike.

You see, even speculating about potential wording gets us into a mire of 
definitions. And that's all from our (today's) point of view. 10 years 
ago, I believe, the term "share-alike" wasn't even used; people said 
"copyleft" back then. Who knows what we will be talking about in 2020?

> Well, there is a problem - I create map for *today*. Now, we need a
> good, solid map. OSM is way to do it. Yes, there are sources which are
> PD and free and you can do whatever you want with it. But there are
> also very valuable sources which comes with restrictions. For time
> these restrictions matched our current license. Now we have to abandon
> and clean out these sources because license of OSM might change in the
> future.

Many of these sources will also change their licenses over time. It is a 
very interesting topic, maybe for another time, what happens if you 
import data from a share-alike source today but in 5 years the data 
source goes PD. Will the data you have imported now have to be deleted 
and re-imported to take advantage of the greater flexibility, or can it 
just be "switched"?

Bye
Frederik

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