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

[Rob Myers]

On 11/12/10 12:42, Simon Ward wrote:
>
> I think it is unnecessary to leave it wide open.

"free and open" doesn't leave it wide open.

> I don’t necessarily want relicensing to be prevented, but I think doing
> it should be discouraged.  The Wikipedia relicensing was similarly a big
> effort, and they actually sought the clause, which was time‐limited, to
> allow them to relicense.  The FSF could have just said “no” (but they
> listened to reason, and ultimately Wikipedia was still freely licensed).
> It was a big step, and proportionally a lot of thought went into it.  A
> lot of thought has gone into applying the ODbL to OSM (sadly not much of
> it went to the CTs).  Then we just give OSMF blanket rights, and define
> some very open conditions for relicensing, and the sense of proportion
> is lost.

Relicencing is, I agree, a drastic move. But we are talking about making 
it possible or not here. And it is something that requires a convincing 
vote to achieve under the CTs.

> How widespread is this really?

DRM, SaaS, Software Patents and Tivoisation? Apple, Microsoft and Google 
seem to be doing OK from them.

> The types of devices where this has
> become a problem also tend to be running Busybox which has a history of
> pulling people up for licence violations.  It gives the manufacturers
> bad press, and we get to avoid these devices for the free software
> friendly competition (ok, so there wasn’t much competition in the TiVo
> space at the time).  We got new licences to choose from that countered
> “Tivoisation” and software as a service issues.  Let’s not also forget

We did. Which is precisely my point. The Linux kernel cannot move to them.

> the large projects, most notably Apache, that use even more permissive
> licences (the old GPL vs BSD arguments, oh the flames).

Let's also not forget that Apache's corporate-friendly permissive 
licencing is the reason Google have been taken to court by Oracle.

> I do not think arguing by counter example is sufficient proof here.
> Those historical examples were special cases in their own rights, and a

They are examples of large projects. That they had their own specific 
reasons for relicencing underlines the fact that relicencing is a 
general problem rather than one that only problem or opportunity X can 
lead to.

> large number of projects have also survived without the need to ever
> relicense.

Smaller projects, yes.

> I didn’t say it what you wrote was incorrect.  I implied that you were
> using the current “wrong” licence choice as a reason for leaving it wide
> open because of the fear that it will happen again.

And I implied that calling an argument that presents its case based on 
evidence and argument "fear" was a rhetorical move rather than any kind 
of refutation of the argument.

> I’m not after the freedom to relicense here, I’m after the freedom for
> the data to be useful.  I don’t believe the freedom to relicense plays a
> large part in the continued usefulness of the data, the licence itself
> helps more with that, and if it doesn’t, why are we moving to it again?

And why didn't OSM just use it to start with??/

- Rob.