[OSM-legal-talk] Upgrading to future ODbL version

James Livingston lists at sunsetutopia.com
Sun Jul 18 05:25:49 BST 2010


On 17/07/2010, at 4:58 AM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>   I noticed something that had escaped my attention until now. The contributor terms say that OSMF will release the data under ODbL 1.0, CC-BY-SA 2.0 or another free and open license accepted by 2/3 of active members.
> 
> Notice the absence of any "or later" clause here. This means that if ODbL 1.1 comes out, it will not be usable out of the box, but we would have to go through the whole "2/3 of active members have to accept" poll to upgrade.
> 
> Is that a desired safeguard against OKFN releasing "bad" new license versions, or is it an oversight?

It's presumably the same reason a lot of people use "GPL 2.0" not "GPL 2.0 or later". Who gets to call something ODbL 1.1, and how can we be sure we trust them?

Consider the dodgy legal hack the FSF and Wikipedia used to do their re-licensing - Wikipedia was under "GFDL 1.2 or later", and they convinced the FSF to release a GFDL 1.3 which let them relicense to CC without copyright holders' permission. I had no problem re-licenseing my small amount of Wikipedia contributions under a CC license, but what they did to do it made me trust the FSF a lot less, and I'm not going to put "or later" on anything I release (L)GPL in the future.



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