[OSM-legal-talk] New site about the license change

[Ed Avis]

Richard Fairhurst <richard at ...> writes:

>>Speaking for yourself, would you be content with a dual licensing or some 
>>other compromise to satisfy both camps? 

>From a community-minded point of view, I'm less sure. The reason I support
>ODbL is that it's a more equitable licence that fixes issues with CC-BY-SA
>and that the community can get behind. I'd personally rather have PD, but
>the community consensus is not there for that; and if the community wishes
>to have a share-alike licence, I'm not comfortable with recommending a
>"leaky" licence whose share-alike provisions can be trivially circumvented.

I feel the same way but I come to different conclusions because of different
starting assumptions.  If the current licence can be trivially circumvented,
people would be doing so by now and we'd see Google or Tele Atlas copying the
OSM data with impunity; yet there are no such examples.  But if nonetheless it
can be ignored, then adding extra magic language to a licence document would not
fix the problem, since nobody need agree to the licence in the first place.

Indeed, I feel the ODbL suffers the inequity problem you describe, in that it
makes various broad claims which honest-minded people will feel bound to follow,
but which, strictly speaking, are unlikely to be enforceable.  On the other hand,
the CC family of licences are carefully written to be pure grants of permission,
giving extra rights beyond those you already have.  In my view, that is fairer.

As for PD, I'm not sure that the 'community consensus' on that has ever really
been measured.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>