[OSM-legal-talk] License Cut-over and critical mass

[Rob Myers]

On 07/14/2010 12:32 PM, Andy Allan wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 12:12 PM, 80n<80n80n at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> The correct way to re-license a project is to fork it.
>
> I whole-heartedly disagree. Do you think that wikipedia should have
> forked for their relicensing? Or Mozilla? They managed to find ways to
> achieve relicensing without the massive upheaval of starting a new
> project - instead they brought everyone along with them and built on
> their success.

As another example, GNU was relicenced from GPL 2 to GPL 3 without 
forking. Projects do not have to fork themselves to apply licencing 
changes that are in-keeping with their mission.

OSM has a clear mandate for the change. A majority (more than half) of 
the electorate voted, and a clear majority of the votes were for the change.

Wikipedia's relicencing went ahead with lower percentages of both voters 
and approval -

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/Licensing_update/Result

OSM's relicencing is therefore more democratic than Wikipedia's was. ;-)

- Rob.