[Strategic] Fwd: Subject: Forks and such

[Grant Slater]

On 31 August 2010 02:33, andrzej zaborowski <balrogg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Last I heard, NearMap, like many individual mappers (me included)
> support the ODbL, but don't support giving the OSMF the possibility to
> change to another license without knowing what that license will be.
> Once a specific license is proposed it will be a good time to decide.
>

As per the contributor terms OSMF does _not_ have an unlimited right
to change the license. Any potential future license change is granted
by a OSMF member vote and a 67% majority community vote.

>
> Which is meaningless because the OSMF wants much broader rights than
> to release the database under this license.  Effectively only
> public-domain-like licenses are compatible (I don't see how CC-By can
> possibly be compatible with the current CT).  So the text of the ODbL
> should not be a factor in the negotiations, it can only be used as a
> sort of bait.
>
> Just today I have started a discussion on the mailing list of another
> CC-By-SA mapping project who's data is being used in OSM to sense how
> much data we will be able to keep.  So far just two people out of
> about 10 who contributed to the discussion openly disagreed, both
> based on the upgrade clause in CT, not the ODbL.  OSMF is an alien
> body to them.
>

Can you name the project?
The Contributor Terms are being worked on by the LWG over the next few
weeks. See: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2010-August/004214.html

Being able to distribute the data under the ODbL is the most
important. If the Contributor Terms are a barrier to keeping a
important dataset and accepting the risk that the dataset may need to
replaced if we (as a project) changed license in future, the data
could be accepted for ODbL distributed under specific terms.

Regards
 Grant