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

Tobias Knerr osm at tobias-knerr.de
Thu Jan 6 09:53:46 GMT 2011


John Smith wrote:
> On 6 January 2011 10:11, Tobias Knerr <osm at tobias-knerr.de> wrote:
>> This would not be better at all, it would render the whole idea of
>> relicensing via Contributor Terms pointless.
> 
> This aregument you keep stating about people thinking the data is
> owned by people isn't the full store, in fact I think it was Anthony
> that pointed this out the other day about people collaborating on a
> movie project and having a certain expectation about the licensing at
> the end of it

Yes, I remember - he used this example to show that majority relicensing
"is not a natural consequence of a collective effort". But that was
never quite my point.

Relicensing through majority /does/ make sense for a collective effort
if the intention is to be actually able to perform a license change. How
many successfully relicensed movies do you know?

> Grant and others keep going on about reading the spirit of the CT more
> than the wording, but at present OSM uses a share a like license
> (similar to GPL) but might switch to a PD/BSD license in future, this
> uncertainty will turn many in the software world off, as I keep asking
> why is the majority of OSM software so proudly offered under GPL and
> not BSD if you want things to be future proofed?

Unlike ODbL, GPL and the FSF have had the opportunity to build trust
over the course of decades. Software licensing is well understood, and
there is an established set of license choices. All this is not true for
ODbL and ODC in the realm of databases. A stable license landscape is
very important for share alike licenses because they tend to be mutually
incompatible even if they have similar intentions.

Another obvious difference is, of course, that the number of programmers
in an FLOSS project is multiple orders of magnitudes smaller than the
number of contributors to our database, making "ask everyone"
relicensing somewhat feasible.

If there is any comparable example at all, it's not software
development, but rather Wikipedia's license change from the dead-end
that was GFDL to the popular CC-by-sa. This was a majority decision,
wouldn't ever have been possible through individual relicensing, and I'm
under the impression that it was almost univerally welcomed as an
excellent move.

Tobias Knerr



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