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

[Anthony]

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org> wrote:
> So BY-SA is not reciprocal in every use case at every conceptual level of
> abstraction either. And there are cases where this doesn't fit people's
> expectations, notably in illustration (photographic and otherwise) as I've
> said.

You're right, of course.  BY-SA provides weaker copyleft than, say
GFDL (this was brought up during the Wikipedia transition to GFDL).

But that doesn't change the fact that ODbL provides even weaker
copyleft than BY-SA.

>> and because it requires distribution
>> of source along with distribution of produced works.
>
> You have to share the database alike, you mean? ;-)

No, that's not what I mean.

> BY-SA 3.0 almost replaced the anti-DRM clause with a parallel distribution
> clause.

But they didn't, right?

> I think this is comparable, although I admit that the requirement
> not to charge for the database in some circumstances may be burdensome.

So, your argument is that ODbL is comparable to something that
CC-BY-SA 3.0 almost was?

I have no idea if that's true or not, but it's quite irrelevant, as
this is not horeshoes or hand granades.

>>> Making mash-ups easier and not excluding incompatible data sources in
>>> what
>>> are now called produced works has always been a strong goal of the OSM
>>> community that I've encountered.
>>
>> So you want to change the license (not just a flaw in the license, but
>> an intentional feature of it).  Fine, go ahead, just be honest about
>> what you're doing.
>
> I *personally* have never bought the "let's make it easier for nice
> corporations to not free their data so people can just mash layers up"
> argument on either a legal or a moral level, but this is already how OSM
> treat the data under BY-SA.

How so?  This may be how Cloudmade treats the data, but
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Common_licence_interpretations says
that mash-ups are generally required to be CC-BY-SA (with a *possible*
exception for mash-ups where the layers "are kept separate and
independent").  How you're supposed to create a mash-up where the
layers aren't mashed up is, I suppose, left as an exercise for the
reader.