[Osmf-talk] my views on the ODbL

[James Livingston]

On 11/12/2009, at 1:03 AM, Kai Krueger wrote:
> If CC-BY is indeed compatible with ODbL, which to me as a layman too sounds like it should be, and the Australian data is CC-BY, can't this whole issue be solved by altering the contributor terms slightly?
> 
> Could clause 3 rather than say "or another free and open license; which other free and open license is chosen by a vote of the OSMF membership and approved by at least a majority vote of active contributors." say something like "or another free and open license _with attribution_; ..." or what ever works legally and guarantees that the any license that can be switched to be be compatible with CC-BY? At that point it seems like anyone could sign the contributor terms for CC-BY licensed data

I'm not sure about it (IANAL) but I'm not sure that helps. The terms say that you need to be the copyright holder or have their explicit permission, would being under a compatible licence count a "explicit permission"? I wouldn't think so, but I may be wrong.


> and we wouldn't loose or have to renegotiate the Australian data, which would make everyone a lot happier.

Something that I just realised we may not have made clear before, is that "renegotiate" isn't the right term in a lot of cases. Recently CC-BY 2.5 (Australia) has become something of a de-facto standard for our governments releasing information that they want the public to use - although there are exceptions, like the National Toilet Map which is under a restrictive licence :(.

A lot of the data that has been released in the last month and a half (most of which we haven't imported or thought about importing yet) was made available without us talking to the copyright holders about OSM.


If it ends up that we need to go and talk to them all to get their explicit permission, then that's the way it is. It'd be nice not to have to, but it we can't make that kind of change without causing other problems, then there isn't a lot we can do about it. As mentioned in other posts, I'm more concerned with not being able to import data that people have had to make available under the ODbL anyway.