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

[John Smith]

On 6 January 2011 19:53, Tobias Knerr <osm at tobias-knerr.de> wrote:
> 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?

That is of course the point, there is expectations that the license
won't change, except to go into PD, although that is occurring much
less frequently.

> 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

At this stage the OSM-F is doing itself a great dis-service with the
way things have been communicated and handled over the licensing issue
and with the continued uncertainty is only continuing to do so.

> 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.

The bigger problem here is with the assumptions that copyright isn't
applicable, especial since others have pointed out the form a map
takes isn't relevant with respect to copyright law. Further more
database directives don't apply to most parts of the world and
enforcing this will make things so much more complicated than a more
simplier copyright license.

> 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.

That of course depends on the project, how many programmers have
contributed to something like the linux kernel?

> 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.

I'm sure there are very few data projects as contributed to as
wikipedia or OSM so these are more exceptions rather than the rule,
which is why I suggested the linux kernel above as a comparable
example.