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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer wrote:
> can I still expect a contructive reply to my email answering your question 
> about my concerns, or should I simply hit the „decline“ button?

In your opinion, what would be the legal consequence of changing the 
contributor terms at this point?

For example, if the definition of who is eligible to vote in a license 
change debate were now changed; would that mean that we would have to 
contact the ~ 100.000 people with edits who have agreed to the "old" CT 
and ask them to agree to the "new" CT as well?

Or would you say that someone who has agreed to let OSMF conduct a vote 
in one specific way will automatically be happy with letting OSMF 
conduct the vote in a different way?

I agree with you in the issue of

>> that the right to vote depends upon being allowed to
>> contribute. 

It would not have cost us anything to think of something that makes OSMF 
evil-doing in this regard impossible (one could say that any past 
contributor who registers with an independent election board would be 
given a vote or so).

I don't agree with you on

>> someone who contributes for a period of 25
>> years and does all contibuting during holidaytime (e.g. in January and in
>> July only) is never entitled to vote.

but anyway that would also be rectified by something like I sketched above.

>> I will not discuss the minor problems now, because I fear personal attacks
>> from people who have a different motivation for contributing if I point
>> these out. If the OSMF is willing to adress the major problems, then I
>> might also contribute some ideas about how to fix the minor issues, but I
>> will not do so while the threat to remove me from the community by force
>> is still active.

First of all, I think that you weren't attacked personally, we just 
didn't like your ideas and explained to you why we thought that you were 
overestimating the rights that contribution to a crowdsourced project 
should confer. You have never actually taken us up on the "contribution 
to a crowdsourced project is like adding water to an ocean" idea; you 
keep repeating that your "motivations are different" and that you demand 
respect for your opinion.

Now we can respect your opinion all we want but we'll have to agree on 
one set of contributor terms in the end. Are you still expecting to have 
a personal veto on data you touched being relicensed, or have we at 
least convinced you in that point? It seems to me that you haven't ever 
conceded the issue; it doesn't appear in your latest text, quoted above 
- does that mean that you are willing to accept the water-ocean idea or 
does that mean that the "I want a veto" idea is now part of the "minor 
issues" you don't dare to mention for fear of personal attacks?

Secondly, nobody removes you from the community by force. Your right to 
participiate in mailing lists, go to community meetings, contribute 
software or make cool stuff with OSM data is not affected if you decline 
to relicense your existing data; you could even, if you wanted to, 
create a new account under CT and do sporadic edits without being forced 
to re-license all your old contributions. If you leave this community, 
then it is entirely by your own decision. If you feel that there is a 
"threat to remove you from the community by force" then you are either 
exaggerating for effect, or you have a perception problem.

Thirdly, you should not try to force a response from LWG about anything 
by threatening them ("... or should I just hit decline"). If this had 
been a geuine question, you'd have put it in a direct message to them; 
with the list as audience, again you're giving the impression that you 
are doing this for effect.

As written above, I think that what you have said about the CT in *this* 
message makes sense, and it would not be a bad thing to have these 
things spelled out in the CT. Alas, I fear that it is now too late to 
change them in this respect; changing the future-relicense-process in 
the CT would in my opinion render the existing CT agreements invalid and 
we'd have to start all over again!

Bye
Frederik

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