[Osmf-talk] Contributor Agreement is Dual Licensing

80n 80n80n at gmail.com
Sun Dec 13 13:17:22 UTC 2009


On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

Isn't that what ODbL plus Contributor Terms is?  Something different from
ODbL, incompatible with other ODbL data and unique to OSM.

It seems to me that the Contributor Terms are the source of many of the
problems identified with the proposed license scheme.  They hinder the
ability for other ODbL datasets to be added to OSM, they prevent
attribution-only datasets from being added to OSM.

Additionally, they load a lot of responsibility onto OSMF and take away the
ability for contributors to protect their own data.

OSMF becomes a single point of failure.  This is not a good thing.
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