[OSM-legal-talk] Noise vs unanswered questions

Dave Stubbs osm.list at randomjunk.co.uk
Fri Sep 3 10:30:44 BST 2010


On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Simon Ward <simon at bleah.co.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 02, 2010 at 12:39:11PM +0100, Rob Myers wrote:
>> On 09/02/2010 11:24 AM, TimSC wrote:
>
>> >1) How is the future direction of OSM determined? Community consensus?
>> >OSMF committees with OSMF votes? Something else?
>>
>> Consensus decision making doesn't mean a 100% plebiscite vote or
>> minority veto power. It means an honest attempt to converge on a
>> compromise. Given this, the ODbL does represent community consensus.
>> It represents a compromise between many different ideological
>> positions present in the community around the norms that have
>> emerged in discussion over the years.
>
> I don’t see much compromise happening from OSMF on the contributor
> terms.  There is a very small amount, but OSMF seems to want to stick as
> close to what they have, with no chance of what they consider a
> significant change.


I think this is slightly ignoring the fact that the CT are the result
of compromises, and were developed over quite some time before being
rolled out. I would say there's reasonable resistance to changing them
at the last moment, especially if they don't actually need to be
changed. They didn't appear out of nowhere and were discussed
extensively as I remember it. Just because there are some problems
doesn't mean there wasn't a consensus or that significant changes are
required (again). I think mostly what's being looked at now are tweaks
and clarifications, which in the end will probably cover most people's
issues, as most people's issues don't actually seem that fundamental.

Dave



More information about the legal-talk mailing list