[OSM-legal-talk] License Cut-over and critical mass
Richard Fairhurst
richard at systemed.net
Thu Jul 15 10:48:26 BST 2010
80n wrote:
> Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 80n wrote:
> > > But the proponents of the ODbL don't have the courage to do
> > > that. Instead they are trying to do it by attrition. First they
> > > give newbies no choice. Eventually, they hope, the number
> > > of newbies and new content will be overwhelming.
> > Interesting accusation. Are you accusing all ODbL proponents of
> > having this plan? Or just the LWG? Or do you care to name anyone
> > in particular? Because otherwise your accusations aren't very
> > constructive.
> The minutes show that Steve Coast, Richard Fairhurst, Mike Collinson
> and Andy Robinson and me decided this on 20th March 2008.
> http://www.osmfoundation.org/images/e/e3/Osmf_boardminutes_20080320.pdf
> And yes, I understood the implications of this and all voted for it (it
> may even have been my idea).
>From my - fairly clear - recollection of the time, there was never any
intention of disenfranchising the existing users by "overwhelming" them with
newbies.
Rather, we were anxious not to make the problem more difficult than it was
then. The more users you have, the more difficult it is to relicense. The
idea behind asking new users to dual-licence their contributions was to keep
the problem at its then level rather than making it any harder. I repeat,
there was never, never any intention to overwhelm the existing contributors.
After all, we should really have fixed this four years ago when we had only
2,500 users:
> [quote from talk list in July 2006]
> I think we as a community should consider doing the following.
> Get a privacy policy put together. Get the license right, or go public
> domain like freethepostcode. The public domain bit is what I meant
> by 'this would encourage forking'. And when these two things are
> in place, shut down openstreetmap and mail all the users (we
> also have no spam policy by the way).
>
> In this email it will explain to all 2,500 or so people that we need
> to get these things in place for the project to continue. It will
> explain the privacy policy we decide. It will explain the license
> and attribution and so on we decide (and if we can't decide, I
> think we should go public domain so people can fork if they like).
That's from
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2006-July/005196.html . But
see if you can guess who wrote it before clicking the link.
I think I'm going to start signing off legal-talk mails with "assume good
faith" rather than "cheers" from now on. ;)
Richard
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