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

[Rob Myers]

On 06/01/11 00:37, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
> Most people contributing to free software/free data
> projects probably have the opposite opinion.

[citation needed]

> 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.

Apache as well.

Many of the most successful projects apart from the Linux kernel in fact.

They may be in the numerical minority, but they are the most used and 
most successful and most influential projects.

> 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.

What makes proprietary projects proprietary is the fact that they are 
proprietary, not the fact that a single body has the ability to defend 
the project against being made proprietary.

Assignment to a trusted third party and fragmentation of rights in a 
project are just two different ways of making a project common property.

- Rob.