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

[Richard Fairhurst]

Alex Barth wrote:
> Fixing the license surely can't be the extent of our plan, but we need 
> to be able to have a frank conversation about how licensing is hurting 
> use cases and engagement on OSM, without second guessing 
> people's intentions and without just showing them the door to
> TomTom and HERE.

I've said this once or twice or eight gazillion times already, but I guess
once more doesn't hurt. :)

ODbL 1.0 - not exclusively an OSM licence, but one strongly informed by OSM
as the biggest producer of collaborative openly-licensed data - was largely
a product of the experiences we'd had up to then.

I, and others, had been burned by CC-BY-SA's requirement to "virally"
license non-data products when using an open data source. This was
(eventually) agreed as a pain point by those of us who shouted loudest, and
so ODbL came to apply the CC-like "collective work" theory to such uses.
That's what became a Produced Work. 

At the time, no-one was doing serious geocoding off OSM data - it wasn't
good enough. So there was no-one prepared to argue for a comparable
rationale for geocoded data. That's not to say that geocoding _shouldn't_ be
considered as a use case for an open database licence. Nor is it to say that
there was any great intent in the relicensing process to rule out geocoding
uses. We just, genuinely, hadn't thought of it... and no-one had pointed it
out to us.

It would be good to fix it _with_a_rationale_. It can't just be "we need
this to work". There has to be a cogent argument why a reciprocal open data
licence, outwith of OSM, can permit it. I'm 100% sure that case can be made,
but it can't be done by fiat. It has to be expressed as "this legalese will
further the aims of a reciprocally licensed data project" as exemplified by
OSM, because it is still the case that OSM's rights-holders - the
contributors - won't agree to anything else.

ODbL needs a 1.1. Creative Commons, working in the much better understood
field of copyrightable artistic works, is already on 4.0 - which is a
realistic recognition that the previous three versions haven't been perfect.
There's no admission of failure on the part of OSM, ODbL, OSM's users, or
anyone to admit that "this can be improved". Of course it can. Let's focus
on the achievable goal of working with Open Data Commons to do just that.

your friendly local WTFPL fundamentalist
Richard





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