[OSM-legal-talk] New OSM contributor licensing under ODbL and CC-BY-SA started today

andrzej zaborowski balrogg at gmail.com
Wed May 12 16:37:35 BST 2010


> On 12/05/10 16:23, Jochen Topf wrote:
>
>> This puts the OSMF in a unique position to undermine the whole project. If
>> somebody subverts the OSMF, he can do whatever he wants with the data. I don't
>> think its a good idea to expose the OSMF to even the possibility of that
>> happening. The whole point of the license is to give *nobody* a way to make
>> the once open data not open anymore. With the IMDB and the CDDB we have two
>> examples where this exact thing went bad. Not somebody coming from the outside
>> taking the data and making it proprietary, but somebody from the inside.

This is a bit of fail IMHO.  On the most "open" side of the discussion
(mailing lists) it has been pretty clear that nobody really wants
that, and also that the license should allow us to import data created
by other people under ODbL possibly derived from OSM.

Then I think the LWG kind of reviewed this and decided that it wasn't
feasible for some reason but never got back to the mailing lists about
it, at least that was my impression.

Now saying new contributors have to agree to the CC-By-SA and ODbL is
a little unprecise.  I thought that was the case based on the two mail
announcements sent today, but it's the Contributor Terms, not ODbL
based on what Avar reports.

Cheers




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