[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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