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

[Tobias Knerr]

On 28.07.2012 14:38, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Even if you should think that CC-BY-SA is just as good as ODbL, you can
> hardly expect OSMF to concede that! It would essentially mean that all
> the problems we had with the license change were only created to be
> able to offer an *additional* license, ODbL, thereby providing more
> choice the downstream users. That would hardly have been a sufficient
> reason.

OSMF would not at all concede that the concerns were unfounded! After
all, dropping CC-BY-SA would remain a possible response if its
weaknesses are actually exploited some day in a manner that harms the
project. Dual licensing simply means that we do not use this option
*preemptively*, and this could easily be communicated as such.

Until now, we were in a situation where we would have been helpless
against legal abuses. With the copyright distributed among thousands of
mappers and the data being bound to a single license, there was no way
for us to respond to large-scale legal exploits to within a reasonable
amount of time and without heavy data losses.

OSMF has recognized this danger and made sure that - should the need
arise - we will be able to respond quickly and in a meaningful way,
thanks to CT and centralized licensing of the database as a whole.

If we, in addition to the reasoning above, emphasize the other benefits
of the new licensing situation (such as the clearer situation of
attribution, the prevention of future data losses due to any licensing
changes, etc.), it is easily apparent that we have gained a lot through
the re-licensing efforts. Dual-licensing does hardly detract from that.

Tobias