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

[Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer]

Hi Rob,

thanks for your long., thoughtful email.

There are a number of conflicting opinions in the OSM community:

1. Contributions to OSM should be public domain to achieve maximum usefulness.

2. The contributions to OSM should be guaranteed to never end up in 
proprietary databases if these were originally made under share-alike terms.

3. The OSMF and an arbitrarily defined subset of contributors should be free 
to decide upon future licenses, including a possible move to public domain.

Neither of these opinions are ideology per se. They become ideology in the 
exact moment when someone says: "None of the other opinions are valid", or: 
"Only my opinion is allowed within the OSM community", or: "If you are not 
blinded by ideology then you will have to agree that all other opinions are 
hurting the project."

I have made the experience that it is not worth to participate in flame wars 
with people who refuse the mininum respect of acknowledging that other people 
might have equally valid reasons for their opinion.

If the people on this mailing list had been more respectful of other opinions, 
then it might have been possible to convince me that the OSM community is 
likely to make the right choices in the future, and that I should trust them 
to do the right thing.

What I see instead is that people refuse to deal with the real problems in the 
CT and are instead only interested in framing me as an ideologist.

“Trust the sysadmins never to lock people out of the community, and we will 
lock you out until you agree” is a self-contradicting position.
Another self-contradicting position is: “Trust the community to always make 
good license choices in the future. We will ignore your well-argued concerns 
and claim you to be an ideologist until you agree.”

Olaf