[OSM-legal-talk] Relicensing, PD, leverage and petitions

[TimSC]

Hi all,

It seems to me mapping contributors can primarily influence in outcome 
of the relicensing in two ways: their choice relicensing their own 
contributions in the project and their involvement after the switch. I 
was considering how those two factors can be used to encourage others to 
release as much data as possible as public domain. I won't bother 
covering the reasons in favor of PD here, but a significant number of 
mappers are against it, of course. Firstly, the pro-PD people could 
propose a "strings attached" deal to OSMF as a condition for relicensing 
their data. After relicensing, the pro-PD people have their leverage 
watered down by the contributor terms. Secondly, our involvement in OSM 
after the switch can have "strings attached". If a significant minority 
unified on this, it would be very hard for OSMF to ignore. Of course, 
this only works if both sides in a deal have an amicable arrangement. I 
am not suggesting backmail! After all, the whole point of PD is that 
people can do what they want with the data.

For the conditions for relicensing our individual contribution's, I 
propose the following. Each "data object" (either a node, way or 
relation) have one or more authors. For each data object, we will agree 
to relicense our data as ODbL, if all other authors agree to release 
their data as PD. Note that each data object is treated independently: 
if two authors both agree, all their shared data is relicensed as PD 
(and ODbL). If an anti-PD author refuses, none of the data shared in 
common with a pro-PD-person will be relicensed. This will encourage 
anti-PD people to release their data, particularly when it is in an area 
overlapping many other pro-PD users. The pro-PD people have a strong 
negotiating position if they have a few key mappers operating in a wide 
area. But pro-ODBL people also get what they want: the data will be 
relicensed as ODbL. Even if OSMF does not provided infrastructure to 
support a future PD fork, the data will still be there for use in local 
scale PD mapping projects.

The biggest problem I can see is there is data that is derived from PD 
incompatible licenses. I guess what we really need to ask is people 
release their original work into PD and ensure they use correct source 
tags for incompatible data. This would provide a basis for a PD dataset, 
once the incompatible data is removed. Of course, that is a non-trivial 
task. It is likely that the ODbL relicensing will be faced with a 
similar filtering task as well, unless they get 100% agreement on 
relicensing imports.

As for our continual involvement in the project, we can make it 
conditional on having a fork under some other license - I guess PD, or 
CC-BY-SA or similar. Given enough people, this would be a bargaining 
clip to get any concessions from OSMF. Of course, this has a greater 
risk of fracturing the community, so unreasonable demands should not be 
made. We are of course all participating in OSM by free choice, so many 
people might quit if we relicense. I am merely suggesting potential 
quitters get organised and, as a cohesive group, make their feelings 
known to OSMF. Of course, if OSMF claims to listen to contributor's 
concerns, everything will be fine (I hope). Also, the pro-ODbL people 
would be happy with a coexisting fork, as mappers would continue to 
contribute into the overall OSM project, and they can import PD data 
into ODbL OSM, if the benefit outweighs the effort.

I guess the next step is to create petitions for the various possible 
concessions. Or possibly a doodle poll with the options "my relicensing 
is conditional on this proposal", "my future participation is 
conditional on this proposal", "both", "I support this proposal but I 
will continue regardless". This certainly gives us more information than 
the proposed relicensing "yes"/"no" question proposed by the LWG. Being 
a petition, it does not require a "no" option. There is a potential 
problem of spoof signatories - possibly people could confirm their 
position on their OSM profile. Petitions should not be used to change 
the overall direction of OSM - that would require an inclusive poll of 
contributors. But first, I wondered if anyone had thoughts on this?

TimSC

PS The background to my views is partly summarized here: 
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2010-July/003523.html