[Osmf-talk] Contributor Agreement is Dual Licensing

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

2009/12/12 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:
> Gervase Markham wrote:
>> So the official position of the OSMF is that the upgrade clause in the
>> ODbL is not sufficient insurance against future eventualities, and that
>> the OSMF must acquire (joint) full rights over the data of all
>> contributors
>
> No. "full rights" would mean that OSMF can do what they want with the
> data. Instead, they are just asking for the right to license it using
> any "free and open license agreed to by a majority of active mappers",
> which is much more limited that "full rights".
>
>> You are effectively requiring the equivalent of open source code
>> copyright assignment from all contributors.
>
> No; see above.
>
>> "OSMF agrees to use or sub-license Your Contents as part of a database
>> only under the terms of one of the following licenses: ODbL 1.0,
>> CC-BY-SA 2.0, 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."
>> http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Contributor_Terms
>>
>> There is a great deal about this which is strange. If the relicensing
>> happens, then all contributions at the time of the relicensing by people
>> who have agreed to the terms will be under ODbL 1.0 and CC-BY-SA 2.0
>> anyway.
>
> No. If you look closely, the whole relicensing process as published
> today does not contain any element that puts the data under ODbL.
> Everyone just agrees, via the above statement, that OSMF may but the
> data under ODbL, and of course that's what they will do; but if the
> statement above would not contain the sentence about agreeing to let
> OSMF publish the data unter ODbL then there would be no legal basis for
> that.

Couldn't instead the contributors put the data under ODbL and not
grant the Foundation any additional rights?  It seems like this would
solve a couple of problems and would be logically a single step rather
than the two steps the current update plan is trying to make.

Is the only concern that the ODbL may turn out Bad and a new ODbL
version isn't what the Foundation needs it to be, or are there other
concerns?

Cheers