[OSM-legal-talk] CT, section 3

Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer olaf at amen-online.de
Thu Nov 25 21:34:40 GMT 2010


Hi,

a few days ago Richard Weait asked for suggestions patches from people who 
critized CT v. 1.0. I therefore decided to join this mailing list and post a 
suggestion myself.

I am perfectly fine with the ODbL but am unhappy with the CT, because I am not 
allowed to opt-out of license changes that I object to.

My suggestion is the following change to section 3:

  3. OSMF agrees to use or sub-license Your Contents as part of a database and
  only under the terms of one or more of the following licences: ODbL, version
  1.0 or later, for the database and DbCL, version 1.0 or later, for the
  individual contents of the database; CC-BY-SA, version 2.0 or later; or
  such other licence as may be approved by the process defined in section 3.1
  and section 3.2.

  3.1. A free and open license can be chosen by a vote of the OSMF membership
  and approved by at least a 2/3 majority vote of active contributors. An
  "active contributor" is defined as: a contributor natural person (whether
  using a single or multiple accounts) who that has edited the Project in any
  3 calendar months from the last 12 months (i.e. there is a demonstrated
  interest over time); and has maintained a valid email address in their
  registration profile and responds within 3 weeks.

  3.2. OSMF agrees to inform You of all newly approved licenses if You
  maintain a valid email address in their registration profile. OSMF agrees
  not to relicense Your Content to the newly approved licence if You object to
  the license approval within 6 weeks.

Apart from the opt-out clause, I also added "or later" to make it easier to do 
license changes that are already possible anyway. (Both CC-BY-SA and ODbL 
contain clauses that allow upgrading to a later version.)

I will offer a thought experiment to explain why I believe the option to 
object is important. Consider the extremely unlikely event that the OSFM 
suddenly turns evil and wants to sell the OpenStreetMap database content to a 
proprietary competitor. It could then lock out nearly all contributors from 
the system, and make sure that only a few people can continue contributing. 
Those few people could then very easily vote with a 2/3 majority to relicence 
the database to the Public Domain license, which is free and open. It could 
also decide not to publicly release this PD version but to only sell it to the 
competitor.

I know that this thought experiment is absurd. I generally trust the OSFM to 
do the right thing. But I would be far more comfortable with being able to 
opt-out of any license change that I consider problematic.

Thanks for the hard work that the LWG and all other CT revision contributors 
are doing! The process of updating the CT and of responding to criticism 
within the community is far more important to me than the actual result of 
this update.

Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer



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