[OSM-legal-talk] CTs, procedure to change of the license

[Pavel Pisa]

Hello Martin and all others,

thanks for opening the CT discussion. I have expressed
significant concerns about it more times already
and I keep uncomfortable with it wording and way it has
been established

On Thursday 25 October 2012 15:31:10 Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
> I found the thread:
> http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/OSM-legal-talk-CT-time-period-for-reply-to-a
>-new-license-change-active-contributor-td5270119.html
>
> basically what Michael Collinson wrote makes sense:
>
> - In the case of a major license change, there would be a run up of at
> least several months of publicity and discussion before the final formal
> vote announcement.
>
> - Our general objective in the CTs is to leave future generations as
> much flexibility as possible while preserving overall project goals.
>
> - The CTs do not stop such a formal announcement and vote opening to be
> made much earlier. I certainly agree that 6-8 weeks is reasonable should
> we ever go through a big change again.
>
> - There may be ocassions when a small but vital change needs to be made
> if a problem/loop-hole is found with the current license. Hence three
> weeks ... two weeks for someone to be on holiday and one week for them
> to get organised and vote.

I would personally vote for two months. I know people who go
for expeditions for long time and I think that their contributions
can be of high value and should not lost right to vote because they
are not connected to the Net every day.

The minimal period for change discussion should be defined as well.

The open topic is who controls the Contributions Terms changes.
It is OSMF or have other OSM contributors right to control future
of their work and the project? I would prefer if even Contributions
Terms changes require at least some community approval.

I am not sure if definition of the active OSM contributor in CT
is not too strict as well. Again you can do great job by checking
the state and found that there is no need to do modification
or only upload traces to the database to allow future refinement.

I would prefer (still) to have an option to mark my contributions
to be available under CC-BY-SA in addition to ODbL because of long,
long (many years) lack of willingness to communicate above questions
from OSMF side and to be sure that project would not be locked in dead
end in the future.

I expect that same fear and bad feeling lead many people to dismiss
ODbL for their work. The result is quit significant damage in the map
data. Even in areas which I have contributed to and due to long time
left already, I cannot repair them from my memory and my traces only
and would have to go these tracks, hiking paths again. Not so bad,
I would visit these areas in any case, but seeing unneeded destruction
hurts.

Best wishes,

               Pavel Pisa