[Strategic] Fwd: Subject: Forks and such

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 31 August 2010 04:34, Grant Slater <openstreetmap at firefishy.com> wrote:
>> 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.

On a potential future license change I think it would be achievable to
get a similar permission from such a project again, if it's a
reasonable change.  The comments I got today from their contributors
were along the lines of not wanting to wipe out big areas of the data
already in OSM, but avoiding future sharing in either direction (there
has been exchange both ways).

The project is listed as "UMP pc-PL" in the imports catalogue and on
http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright .  It's a single-country
OSM-like effort (but older, more complete, in many parts like Germany
in OSM today).

One of the caveats is that many of the mappers are uncontactable.
However they have been using an *NC*-By license until 2005 and
switched to By-SA on an opt-out basis so the thinking was for this
re-license (of their data in OSM) to also be on opt-out basis as the
only practical option.  I know this sucks, but it's helped by the fact
that their license page (for contributors, not the one for users)
until some time ago listed just the desired goals of the license
(attribution, share-alike), without naming CC-By-SA.

Cheers