[OSM-legal-talk] Please, consider that more people want to mark even their future ODBl OSM contributions as CC-BY-SA compatible

andrzej zaborowski balrogg at gmail.com
Fri Jul 27 23:47:34 BST 2012


On 27 July 2012 23:52, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Jul 2012 22:33:59 +0200
> andrzej zaborowski <balrogg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> That's not the point, you still can't mix the future OSM data with
>> CC-By-SA data in the same database and publish that.  This ability to
>> "mix" is one of the main features of free licensing and if you're
>> using a license incompatible with every other project, your data
>> becomes useless for a lot of uses.
>
> Err... share-alike licenses rarely allow any mixing. CC-BY-SA cannot be
> mixed with CC-BY-SA-NC; neither of them can be mixed with GFDL or
> GPL... so nothing new here: Any share-alike provision reduces
> usefulness.

They don't allow mixing with differently licensed datasets, is that
what you mean?  CC-By-SA is quite a popular license and allows mixing
OSM data with many more datasets than ODbL does, today.

Yes, the share-alike provision reduces usefulness, and this can be in
a some small part helped by publishing under those share-alike
licenses which are popular, especially if OSM *today* has consumers
who use those licenses.  Dropping any of the licenses is one thing
that definitely does not help to reduce this effect.

>
> ODbL, with its lack of share-alike for produced works, is already one
> of the more liberal share-alike licenses. Of course, dropping
> share-alike altogether would make OSM even more useful in the sense that
> you describe.
>
> What you're proposing (or seconding) here is quite difficult; it would
> mean having a second licensing model inside OSM and having to track
> exactly what is derived from what in order to find out which license
> can be applied. It is much more than just a flag on a user page.

I was personally thinking of just publishing the full planet the same
way it is published today, in addition to ODbL, because I can't see
anything or anyone in who's interest it is to not do that.  It costs
nothing because those two particular licenses are allowed in the
Contributor Terms.

In other words, why do something that has no positive effect, and does
have a negative effect.

Cheers



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