[OSM-legal-talk] Exception in Open DataLicense/Community Guidelines for temporary file
Tobias Knerr
osm at tobias-knerr.de
Fri Jul 1 13:58:14 BST 2011
Ed Avis wrote:
> Tobias Knerr <osm at ...> writes:
>
>> Altogether, it seems that ODbL does burden creative users of OSM with
>> significant restrictions, even though in many cases there is no reason
>> why anyone would even want that databases they are forced to share -
>> because it will usually be much more practical to just use the original
>> databases.
>
> That's true, but to be fair it does allow the final 'produced work' to be
> distributed under any licence, where previously it had to be under the same
> licence as the underlying map (CC-BY-SA).
True, that's an advantage. Still, for folks who want to use OSM to
produce open produced works, ODbL adds to legal uncertainty and imposes
annoying requirements that are hard to implement in practice, so there
is a high price to pay for the possibility to choose an attribution-only
license instead of a share alike license for the product. There's not
even an advantage at all if you prefer CC-BY-SA for your produced works
(as many will doubtlessly do).
Of course you do potentially gain a lot if you want to create
/restricted/, rather than open, produced works, but that should not have
a higher priority for our license choice than ease of use for the
creation of open works.
> Most of these concerns could be alleviated by dual-licensing under both ODbL
> and CC-BY-SA.
I'm not fond of the ODbL and would be happy with a CT + CC-BY-SA
solution (it could achieve most of the declared aims of CT + ODbL and
avoid most of the problems), but dual-licensing would of course be even
more convenient from the perspective of a data user.
-- Tobias Knerr
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