[OSM-legal-talk] Proposed "Metadata"-Guideline

[Eugene Alvin Villar]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 11:49 PM, Mr. Stace D Maples <
stacemaples at stanford.edu> wrote:

> One other question, and I’m just curious, not trying to start a flame war.
> Isn’t some of the data in OSM from public domain datasets? If so, what is
> the OSM rationale for placing a more restrictive licensing model on that
> data?
>

Well, this issue is actually a "religious" war most commonly known as the
BSD vs. GPL debate.

Personally, I take issue with your statement that ODbL is a "more
restrictive" license than public domain. It all depends on your definition
of "restrictive" vis-a-vis "freedom". Public domain or CC-BY-style
licensing (aka BSD style) does provide the immediate user with a lot more
rights than a share-alike license like ODbL or CC-BY-SA (aka GPL style).
However, those rights are only guaranteed for the immediate user. The
immediate user can add his own improvements to it and then make those
improvements proprietary—a usage right that's allowed. Unfortunately, other
users cannot make use of those improvements.

On the other hand, a share-alike license aims to be a more sustainable
model. It restricts the immediate user on only one aspect: the right to
make a share-alike content/data/IP proprietary is explicitly disallowed.
This ensures that any improvements are shared back to the community, unlike
with the BSD-style licensing.

For me, share-alike licensing for OSM data is a net positive. This
licensing ensures that nobody can take the data, improve it to make it even
more valuable and then make it proprietary.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/attachments/20151010/0b3ad5d6/attachment.html>