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

[Robert Kaiser]

Anthony schrieb:
> On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 9:40 AM, Robert Kaiser<kairo at kairo.at>  wrote:
>> Anthony schrieb:
>>> 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?
>
> No, I'm saying they don't have 100,000 contributors (with the obvious
> context that I'm talking about contributors of "significant
> contributions").

Neither have we. And no, my mapping of a single midsize town and random 
small other things is not significant in terms of the project in any 
way. IMHO, there are probably not more than 50, perhaps 100, 
"significant" contributors to OSM - fewer than the GNU project has.

>>> 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.
>
> Where does CC-BY-SA 3.0 say that it does not apply to "databases like
> OSM"?  3.0 explicitly does not apply to non-copyrightable collections
> of data.  On the other hand, it explicitly does apply to maps.

IANAL, but maps (like Mapnik tiles, for example) are just a product of 
the OSM data. Fine if those products can be protected by CC-BY-SA, but 
our real concern needs to be thee data behind them. And from all I've 
heard, most of that is very probably not copyrightable - at least in a 
number of significant jurisdictions. And that means, the CC-BY-SA 3.0 
license doesn't really apply to our data.

> If CC-BY-SA is the same spirit as ODbL, there wouldn't be any reason to switch.

Wrong. If it makes the situation more equal and clear across different 
jurisdictions, abolishes the legal diffusion and per-country unfairness 
we are in right now and still preserves the same basic spirit behind it, 
then there's a very good reason switch. And that's where I'm seeing us at.

>> 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.
>
> So my analogy was correct.  You agree ODbL is not in the same spirit
> as CC-BY-SA, just like LGPL is not in the same spirit as GFDL.

No. I think all of those are in the spirit of being free and open 
share-alike licenses, just for different kinds of things, and ODbL and 
CC-BY-SA are both attribution licenses, though we never really did 
follow the exact terms of CC attribution, or the attribution texts would 
in most cases be larger than the map images.

> If ODbL were CC-BY-SA for databases, I'd be in favor of it.  It isn't.

And I think you won't get anything applying to our database that is more 
similar in spirit than this. But if we might get at some point in the 
future, at least clause 3 of the CTs gives us a potential way to switch 
to that.

Robert Kaiser