[OSM-legal-talk] CTs are not full copyright assignment

Rob Myers rob at robmyers.org
Fri Jun 17 14:50:45 BST 2011


On 17/06/11 14:07, Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer wrote:
> 
> Shortly after I wrote these words, a respected community member
> attacked me as being "blinded by ideology".

This anonymous but respected community member, during a lengthy debate
regarding your concerns about the CTs, wrote:

"""I mean, you can be for or against anything right now, but if you are
not blinded by ideology of any sort then you will have to accept that
times change, and that *anything* you try to enshrine for eternity will
hurt the project."""

Which is not an attack, it is an argument.

They then wrote:

"""This is not about people in groups, about ideology, about a fork, or
about who owns what.

What we do is a huge, collective work. As part of your commitment to
this project, you have to accept that you cannot always have it your
way; and that you will occasionally have to follow what a large majority
wants. Either you take part in the project or you don't.

You say you want to be "asked".

I think it is simply an illusion to believe that you could take part in
this but have a veto. If the technical team decides to switch to Oracle
you won't have a veto. If the majority of mappers decide they want to
change everything from "highway=" to "road=" you won't have a veto. If
they decide to rename the project "Whuzzit" instead of "OpenStreetMap"
you won't have a veto. In all these case you will not only not have a
veto, you will not have a legal basis to disallow that the project
continues to use what you have once contributed.

You say you want to retain "control".

It is not normal for the individual in this project to have any kind of
control. We have had cases where somebody contributed data and later
changed his mind, leaving the project and removing his data. The data
was then promptly re-instated by others. Is that what you would call
"having control"?

If you participate in OSM, you are adding water to an ocean. It does not
make sense to want to hold on to "your" bit of water. If this is
important to you, then I think you should think twice about
participating in a project like this."""

I quote this at such length to show that your objections to the CTs were
seriously engaged with when you raised them and that the reason why the
CTs should not be changed in response to them was explained in detail.

- Rob.

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