[Osmf-talk] Contributor Agreement is Dual Licensing

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Gervase Markham wrote:
> On 12/12/09 15:16, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>> The main reason, I think, is that what you (the individual contributor)
>> have is not necessarily a database (think of someone just making a few
>> fixes to road names or so).
> 
> That may be true. But that doesn't require the OSMF to have special 
> rights. Why not write the licence so whatever rights downstream users 
> need are granted to them directly by the original submitter of the data? 
> There should be no need for the involvement of a third party.

ODbL is a license that can be used for people who already have a 
database that they want to license.

That OSM is a project where a database comes into existence by having 
lots of people contribute to a common pool is outside the scope of ODbL.

Making a license that covers the crowd-sourced creation *and* the 
downstream licensing of a database would surely be possible but that 
would be an entirely different beast I believe, and also one that would 
in all likelyhood be a special OSM license used by nobody else than OSM.

Bye
Frederik