[OSM-legal-talk] Phase 4 and what it means

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Mike Dupont wrote:
> but seriously, the license team is not concerned about porting the
> licenses to other jurisdictions, but once you have signed the new
> contributor terms, they will not ever have to ask you again. This
> process is about you giving up all your rights, not them doing
> anything for it in return.

Well the "license team" does not *gain* anything from you signing the 
contributor terms, so what should they do for you in return?

Additionally, "giving up all your rights" would probably mean something 
like the switch to a Public Domain license. We are not doing that.

If you sign the Contributor Terms you allow OSMF to use your data in a 
certain way which is described exactly in those terms, and which is 
quite different from OSMF being able to do anything they want.

Actually it is nothing different that what "the osm fork team" seem to 
want to do (CC-BY-SA, I believe): once you hand something out under 
CC-BY-SA you allow people to use it without ever having to ask you 
again. I challenge you to point out the fundamental difference.

> The quality of the license is poor,

Independent lawyers have said it is the "best share-alike license for 
databases available". Please point me to an ODbL evaluation, written by 
a lawyer, that supports your claim.

> the support in the open source
> community is next to zero, 

The support for your chosen license, CC-BY-SA I assume, was next to zero 
when it was new, too.

> the fragmented nature of the documents is
> annoying, 

Agreed.

> there are many unanswered questions as well,

There are even more unanswered questions about your chosen license as 
applied to geodate. (Do I have to list all names?)

> the missing
> compatibility with creative commons is a serious roadblock, 

Someone who uses "creative commons" in a sentence like you just did 
should be disqualified from discussing licensing, at all. Creative 
Commons sponsors *several* licenses that are incompatible. No license on 
earth can be compatible to CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-SA-NC at the same time. 
 From that it follows that every license on earth, including every 
Creative Commons license, is incompatible to (some license sponsored by) 
Creative Commons. "serious roadblock" indeed!

> But once enough people have signed away their rights

That's an attempt at demagogy. You are not signing away your rights any 
more with our Contributor Terms that you are, for example, with CC-BY-SA.

> the license can
> be changed at whim

The Contributor Terms require a 2/3 majority and a "free and open 
license". If you truly believe that the word "at whim" is a correct 
desription for that, consult a dictionary.

> and adjusted so that it will mostly work, and if it
> does not, tough luck.

As you probably know, most current Creative Commons licenses have an 
automatic upgrade path that allows them to be "adjusted". I think this 
is a good thing and I don't believe one should critisize the authors of 
a license for allowing that.

> We, the osm fork team are working on preserving your work and your
> contributions under the existing license.

There is doubt whether the existing license is suitable to "preserve" 
the work.

> I personally wish that the
> leaders of OSM were not so "us against them",

You mean "us against we, the osm fork team"?

> Osm fork now has the resources to host the tiles 

... thanks to the good people at archive.org, I believe. Why not say so, 
there's no shame in that. Do archive.org know that they are hosting a 
fork of OSM?

> and also does not have the bandwidth problems that osm does. 

We should be lucky that not everyone who sees a bandwidth problem starts 
a fork, huh?

> The only thing that is
> missing is a good rendering solution for drawing updates, we are
> working on new software to do a better tiles at home to render in a
> distributed fashion. 

That's interesting to hear.

> When these things are in place your maps of
> Thailand will not be lost, your data will be available and the tiles
> will be usable also going into the future.

Of the 50 top contributors in Thailand, 39 have agreed to the 
Contributor Terms and ODbL and 1 has said no; 10 are yet undecided. It 
doesn't look as if there will be any map problems in Thailand.

> I wish that OSM was not so monolithic, but there does not seem to be
> any compassion or understanding for allowing multiple tiles, multiple
> license or multiple layers in osm proper.

What's the difference between "multiple tiles" and "multiple layers"? We 
do still have the Osmarender layer, and last thing I heard was Strategic 
Working Group actively looking for new tile sources to be considered for 
the main page.

Having said that, OSM is much more than www.openstreetmap.org.

> With great sadness to I write these words 

And also with great confusion, it seems, since at least half of it was 
based on false assumptions.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"