[OSM-legal-talk] OS Opendata & the new license

[Elizabeth Dodd]

On Fri, 01 Oct 2010 11:01:12 +0100
Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org> wrote:

> On 10/01/2010 10:38 AM, Elizabeth Dodd wrote:
> > I ask once more
> >
> > "from where did OSMF get a mandate to change the licence?"
> 
> The vote.
> 
> > OSMF is a small set of persons and is not representative of OSM as a
> > community.
> 
> Any representational or governing body will be a "small set of
> persons". Depending on which sense of "representative" you are using,
> the vote rings true given my experience of OSM debates around
> licencing and OSMF is as open and responsible or more so than other
> Free projects.
> 
> Anyone can join OSMF.
> 
> - Rob.
> 

The vote is not a mandate. It is a vote of a subset of persons. Being a
member of the OSM community is not a condition of belonging to OSMF.

Not everyone can join OSMF.
Joining is restricted to persons with enough spare cash to pay a fee in
Pounds Sterling, access to a system for international money transfer if
not in the UK, and a number of other practical points dependent on UK
law - I would expect that minors are not supposed to be voting members
of a UK company. The ability to manage well in written English would be
a practical requirement.
To pick an obvious example, the persons who mapped Nigerian slums are
unlikely to have the financial resources to join. Most students don't
have such resources. I would not expect the students involved in
mapping ShimlaPuri to have the financial resources.


OSMF was set up for a particular purpose. Because responsibility for
the servers implies responsibility for the contents, the extension was
made to the licence. OSMF extended itself this privilege, not the OSM
community.