[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] ODbL vs CC-by-SA pros and cons

[Robert Kaiser]

Anthony schrieb:
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 11:00 AM, Robert Kaiser<kairo at kairo.at>  wrote:
>> Actually, IMHO, it's was wrong of the OSM project to do neither a copyright
>> assignment nor a license that has a clear clause on automatic possibility of
>> upgrade to a newer license in the same spirit (i.e. and "and later" clause).
>
> Copyright assignment could never work on a project with 100,000 contributors.

So you say the GNU project should not work? Or the OpenOffice.org project?

> CC-BY-SA 2.0 does have an "and later" clause.

Where "later", i.e. 3.0 explicitely does not apply to databases like 
OSM. So only one more reason for us to switch elsewhere. But we know 
that already.

> And ODbL is not in the "same spirit" as CC-BY-SA, any more than LGPL
> is in the "same spirit" as GFDL.

That's your opinion, and anyone with legal knowledge in here seems to 
dispute both of those statements. But of course, you can't use a 
documentation license for creative works, a code license for 
documentation or a creative license for a mostly factual database - at 
least not reasonably. And that's what all our relicensing is about in 
the end.

Robert Kaiser