[OSM-legal-talk] CTs and the 1 April deadline

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 6 January 2011 01:11, Tobias Knerr <osm at tobias-knerr.de> wrote:
> Ed Avis writes:
>> Frederik Ramm <frederik at ...> writes:
>>
>>> Could someone, of that disposition, let's call him A, not simply do the
>>> following: Make a contract with person B that says "Dear B, you may use
>>> my data but only under ODBL 1.0 and nothing else"; then instruct B to
>>> upload the stuff to OSM. Now the data is in OSM, but in the event of any
>>> later license change, B (and therefore A) would have to be consulted.
>>
>> This does seem to be possible from a strictly legalistic point of view.
>>
>> I think that in the CTs (as in other things) we should concentrate more on the
>> spirit of the agreement than on trying to armour-plate it in legalese. It would
>> be better to have a free and obvious choice:
>
> This would not be better at all, it would render the whole idea of
> relicensing via Contributor Terms pointless.
>
> Non-relicenseable data should at most be an /exception/.

That's your opinion and you are free to have it (...but don't force it
on others).  Most people contributing to free software/free data
projects probably have the opposite opinion.  There are projects like
Mozilla, Qt or some FSF's projects that also request the right to
relicense by a single body but they're in minority.  Most other
projects called open have it as a basic philosophical point that
everything is owned by the contributors and no single body owns the
rights to all of the content (unless it has created all of it).  The
facebook/google mapmaker/(pick your favourite proprietary
service)-model is the last thing we'd like in our projects and
practice shows that projects can live very well in the open model.

Cheers