[OSM-legal-talk] CTs are not full copyright assignment (was: Re: Phase 4 and what it means)

[Mike Dupont]

The people are not being asked to agree to a license in general, but
to give up an allow the board to tweak the license for them.
What is upsetting for me is that there is no porting process like with
creative commons, and any leverage one might have will be lost when
you agree to the CT.

OK, you are giving up all say in the future re-licensing. I should be
more careful with words.

How is this, which is more what I mean :

This process is about you giving up all your rights to approve license
change or have any personal say as a normal contributor in the OSM,
not them doing anything like producing a *final* and complete license
or terms for review, spending the effort to port the license to other
jurisdictions, or present a plan for how to harmonize with the
creative commons in return.

I think that granting osmf these rights will reduce any possible
future negotiation strength and that by not agreeing to something that
I see as unfinished and untested is the only way to exercise the
little rights I have left. I am still interested in contributing
indirectly to osm, either by publishing data in cc-by-sa (which is
what I mean by creative commons in all my dicussions on this list
because it is the current license for the data) or some other share
data license that I can understand, but I dont see the point in
accepting the CT at all if it will reduce my rights.

It would be possible to publish data in a compatible licensed form on
some public hosting system with no CTs and let people import the data.
I could even find someone who has no stake in the project, or someone
who has accepted the ct to do those imports if they are valuable.  So
I am happy to be an indirect contributor to OSM in the future, as I
mentioned before, archive.org has much more space for storing even osm
data or other map data than osm does. I am experimenting with hosting
osm data on git. So for me this all represents an opportunity to help
the osm community by building tools and exploring technology to see
how distributed and decentralized mapping can work.

You can also use the ODBL dual license on files hosted on archive.org,
they support right now public domain and creative commons licenses.
You can host osm files and tiles there and slippy maps. these tiles
can also be used in josm. So you don't need to use a central database
at all. There are also other free hosts for map data.

I hope that my contributions will be used or usable by people, and
that they will be able to create custom layers, be able to host them
and not have to submit to a shifting license.

The other point to mention is that for the wikipedia hosted tiles,
what will happen when the quality of areas goes down the tubes after
the data deletions, maybe in some areas you have an over abundance of
mappers, but in some parts of the world you will have data loss. On
those areas we should consider using the backup of the osm data for
wikipedia tiles where it will be better. I think there will be a good
argument for doing so. I think you will need both the new and the old
tiles to have a good coverage of the world. I hope that we will be
able to merge the two datasets in some way in the future for rendering
purposes, need to understand the license better.

Another thing is all these points being made in the emails, we should
have FAQ points on them, so instead of being told that I am an idiot,
be pointed at a faq entry that describes this point in detail. An
annotated license document for the current creative commons license
and the ODBL would be nice where you can see each point and where the
issues are. I am willing to try and understand the ODBL for
compatibility and reuse and dual licensing purposes. I was also
willing to do that before, but the issue of the CT came up and I
cannot even edit any more on OSM. Now I am busying helping creating
alternatives for people who are also skeptical about the way things
are handled. It should be something that OSMF should be doing, instead
of trying to force people to accept the new CTs they should allow them
to continue on a separate database while the new regime is tested. But
since I am not part of the OSMF I am forced to build these tools
outside of the foundations, and am them attacked as the enemy. Why am
I the enemy? I dont want to be the enemy, I am also interested in
helping map the world. Lets work together on points we can agree on.

mike

On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 1:40 AM, David Ellams
<osmlists at dellams.fastmail.fm> wrote:
> I have no intention of getting into a debate about whether ODBL is the
> best licence for OSM data here. However, I do feel the need to correct
> one very important factual point regarding the Contributor Terms.
>
> On Mon, 06 Jun 2011 06:20 +0200, "Mike Dupont"
> <jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> This process is about you giving up all your rights, not them doing anything for
>> it in return.
>
> No, you are granting rights to OSMF, not giving up all your rights.
> There is nothing to stop you additionally licensing your contributions
> in any way you like.
>
> This is less onerous than the FSF terms (which seem to be fairly widely
> accepted in the open source software community). FSF requires full
> copyright assignment: you lose title to your own code. OSMF does not
> require that: you still have title and you still have rights, but OSMF
> gains rights (subject to conditions), too, and can thus include your
> data in the OSM database.
>
> FSF FAQ re copyright assignment:
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright
>
> Text of FSF copyright assignment form:
> http://www.dreamsongs.com/IHE/IHE-110.html
>
> David
>
> PS I don’t personally think the FSF-style full copyright assignment is
> evil, but accept others may disagree. The point is that it is irrelevant
> here, because OSMF is not asking for it.
>
> PPS IANAL :)
>
>



-- 
James Michael DuPont
Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova and Albania
flossk.org flossal.org