[Osmf-talk] [OSM-talk] ODBL vote (was Re: Enough is enough: disinfecting OSM from poisonous people)

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemeD.net
Thu Aug 12 10:50:47 UTC 2010


[Apologies for continuing cross-post, please follow-up to OSM legal-talk.]

Sam Vekemans wrote:

> So my question is weather or not, at a later date,  I
> can change my choice (based on new information which would want me to
> change my mind).?

As a general point, if you declare that something is "public domain"  
(say, by a CC0 declaration), you can't reverse it  
_for_that_particular_work_. You have already granted rights for people  
to distribute it without infringing.

You can, of course, declare that your future works will be licensed  
differently.

In the specific case of the OSM database, if you wanted to start doing  
this, you would probably need to establish a per-object licensing  
flag. This would require significant code changes and I assume you're  
not volunteering to do that.

I would suggest therefore that the best way to do that is for you to  
maintain two accounts, one PD and one not. Certainly this is what I  
intend to do, so that I can use the latter for any future substantial  
mapping from attribution-required sources (e.g. OS OpenData). That  
said, substantial mapping if you haven't been there is bad anyway. ;)

cheers
Richard (official OSM PITAFL)





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