[OSM-legal-talk] CT, section 3

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer wrote:
>   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.

I think the weak point here is the focus of ownership in individual 
contributions. I rather liked it how the new CT/ODbL made it irrelevant 
whether something was "yours" or "mine".

We're seeing right now a situation where if you have a new trace along a 
road that already existed in OSM, it may nonetheless make sense to 
delete the existing road and replace it with a new object, just in case 
the contributor(s) who did the old road do not agree to the license 
change. This goes against the grain of a community project.

Your suggested change - small as it is - would mean that in the future, 
it would *still* always be relevant who exactly contributed to a single 
object, so that if a license change happened and that person opted out, 
the data in question could be removed. It would always be "safer" to 
remove something and re-create it instead of building on the works of 
your fellow mappers, because that would not be reliable.

I think the real and tangible negative effect of that would outweigh the 
theoretical and remote positive effect in case of a hostile relicensing 
attempt as you describe.

> 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. 

My feeling is that an OSM database without contributors to keep it up 
and running would be worth very little. At the time of your hypothetical 
lock-out, the project would fork, and value would be created elsewhere.

> 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.

Maybe we should work on *that* bit then. Not give the individual an 
opt-out right, but instead force OSMF to publish. Something like: "As a 
condition of this agreement, OSMF agrees not only to license the 
database under the licenses given, but also to make the database 
publicly available" or so.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"