[Osmf-talk] Results of OSMF Member Vote

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemeD.net
Thu Jan 7 23:38:25 UTC 2010


Matija Nalis wrote:
> Thanks for the history lesson, Richard. I was perhaps misunderstood, I did
> not meant to say that the issue was never risen before (which I'm aware it
> did), but only that (once a decision has been made that we must move from
> CC-BY-SA to something else) LWG itself ("they" I was referring in the
> paragraph)

I know I've said this a million times before, but there is no "they". 
It's a collaborative project. There is only "us".

LWG is the subset of "us" which has been brave enough to put the hours 
in to formally discussing it, with minutes and everything. Anyone could 
volunteer for LWG, you don't even need to have been elected as a board 
member. I believe, though I stand to be corrected, that Ulf Möller is a 
good example of someone who was openly critical of the licence change 
process, put his money where his mouth is, and joined LWG to help change 
things for the better. Hats off to him.

So LWG is just a continuation of the debates we've been having for five 
years now. They weren't tasked with choosing PD or copyleft, no - 
because no overwhelming mandate for that had ever become apparent. If 
the majority of OSM contributors had been agitating for PD for a long 
while, with comparatively little opposition voiced, I'm sure they would 
have done.

There's still nothing stopping anyone else putting forward a PD vote. 
OSMF exists to support, not control the project. It has no special 
powers: only that of contacting every OSM contributor by e-mail, and I 
suspect it would be generous with that (within the bounds of privacy 
etc. etc.) if a coherent case, with a wide groundswell of support, was 
put forward by someone else.

But that hasn't yet happened. The only person who's actually getting up 
and doing something about it is Brendan Morley with his CommonMap 
effort. I wish him luck and I greatly respect what he's doing, because 
it's not enough to criticise LWG; you have to go out and do something 
yourself. Start the evangelism effort. Show those of us who've been 
promoting PD for five years where we went wrong. But we used to have a 
saying on these lists that saying "should" doesn't achieve anything - 
you have to go and do something.

>> In really broad terms: the Doodle poll says 11% don't want to change,
>> 39% want ODbL, 50% want PD but will agree to ODbL. So if you change to
>> PD (or CC0 or whatever), you lose 50% of the data. If you change to ODbL
>> you lose 11% of the data.
>
> But the poll [1] actually does not say that.

Mein gott, we are an pitiable bunch of geeks, aren't we? I mean, I write 
a paragraph that begins "In really broad terms" and people immediately 
hone in on the numbers to say "Well actually considering the standard 
deviation of this and that and the icosahedral hilbert quadtrees and "

gah.

I repeat: really broad terms. It's a vastly imperfect approximation but 
nonetheless all we have at present.[1] It is also what I, even as a PD 
supporter, recognise to be roughly the informal consensus in five years 
of talking to people about this.

It's back to the "mandate" again. I wish this wasn't this case and that 
others had been agitating for PD as long as Frederik and I have. But if 
you think that most CC-BY-SA advocates are going to prefer BSD-style to 
"yet another copyleft licence", well... just, well.

 > As I said, I'm aware of the issue being brought up before; it's just 
that I
 > feel that once a decision was made that license WILL be changed 
(which was
 > relatively recently?),

No decision has been taken. It can't be taken without the permission of 
the users. We don't yet know whether the licence will be changed.

The process was more like this. The licence has always been 
controversial, as per those old postings I dredged up. As time went on, 
more people _perceived_ that the licence was a problem for their 
proposed usage of OSM. Then ODbL came along. A significant number of 
active contributors considered that it could potentially be a better fit 
to OSM than CC-BY-SA is. Since then we have, as a community, resolved to 
consider it and put it to the userbase. If it's not accepted, it's not 
accepted; and we start again, give up, or leave.

cheers
Richard



[1]

for those who really are interested:

	a) "yes I will accept the new license Odbl" - 128
	b) "yes and consider all my data Public domain" - 182
	c) "no I will not accept the new license Odbl but I will if it is 
reworked" - 14
	d) "no, I will not accept Odbl and wants to continue with CC-BY-SA" - 42
	e) "I don't know yet" - 51

of those who expressed an opinion (a+b+c+d = 366):

those prepared to accept ODbL, maybe with some reworking: (a+b+c) / 366 
= 89%
those not prepared to accept ODbL even if reworked: d / 366 = 11%

those prepared to place their data in the public domain: b / 366 = 50%
those who voted in a non-PD category stating that their work could be 
licensed under either share-alike licence (a+c+d) / 366 = 50%

my personal preference: "Dr" Liz / a large axe = FTW!!111




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