[OSM-legal-talk] Rights granted to OSMF (Section 2 of the CT)

[Eugene Alvin Villar]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 1:25 PM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17 April 2011 15:17, Eugene Alvin Villar <seav80 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The point still stands. Granting rights to a central body (but not
>> your copyright--you still retain that) is not unheard of in open
>> communities.
>
> They also aren't generally the most popular, just like BSD lags behind
> Linux, which could be due to the strong sharing clauses of the
> license.

The virality (or share-alikeness) of a license is orthogonal to
whether contributors assign rights or not to a central body.


> The FSF have 20 years of not only expressing strong opinions about
> moral aspects of licensing, but they have stuck to their guns,
> something that the OSM-F hasn't done, SteveC states at various times
> in the past he will only support share a like licenses, yet the ODBL
> and CT both weaken this stance considerably.

On the share-alike, I disagree, but this is a personal preference. I
like the share-alike aspects of ODbL over CC-BY-SA for OSM data. You
think ODbL weakens it, but I like it because you have access to the
derivative data and not just the final product.

On sticking to ones guns, this could be a plus (being consistent) or a
negative (being stubborn). Same with the converse: being flexible vs.
being wishy-washy. Comparing the FSF to OSMF in this way without
considering the context is not very persuasive.