[OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license

[Rob Myers]

On 03/21/2011 06:31 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> Effectively policing *any* license would very likely require a
> *multiple* of OSMF's whole current budget.

The FSF has one paid compliance officer to look after the whole of GNU 
and any other cases that they get involved in.

gpl-violations.org is all volunteers.

For the projects I've spoken to, enforcement is usually a phone call, 
not a court case.

> Do you want to stand before
> mappers and tell them "for every pound we spend for servers to make
> mapping a nicer experience, we spend five pounds to seek out and punish
> license violators"?

It's not just about the experience on OSM's servers, it's about the 
experience wherever the data is encountered.

I think both competent volunteers and any paid roles that take less than 
${ARBITRARY_AMOUNT} of the budget are good investments in keeping the O 
in OSM.

- Rob.