[talk-au] License Upgrade - Stage Two Begins

David Groom reviews at pacific-rim.net
Thu Aug 12 12:32:10 BST 2010


Its really disappointing that the introductory paragraph which says "Please read the agreement below and press the agree button to confirm that you accept the terms of this agreement for your existing and future contributions." does not containing any warning that if you have used any source which requires CC-BY-SA , that you are unable to agree to the CT terms.

Not only does this show disrespect to the members who have raised this point in the past, but If I were one of those sources who had agreed to use my data under CC-BY-SA I would think this showed bad faith on behalf of OSM.

David
 
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Richard Weait 
  To: OSM Australian Talk List 
  Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 12:13 PM
  Subject: [talk-au] License Upgrade - Stage Two Begins



  News today from Mike Collinson, Chair of the OSMF License Working Group:

  As promised, and long awaited, the next phase of the OSM License
  Upgrade has arrived. Phase 2 - Existing Contributor Voluntary
  Re-licensing  [1]  has begun, and you may indicate your acceptance of
  the new Contributor Terms for your existing OSM API account.  To
  accept the terms visit http://openstreetmap.org/user/terms, (you may
  be asked to login first), or your user settings page.

  Please note that OpenStreetMap is not changing the license on any
  published data at this point.  Existing contributors are being asked
  to permit re-licensing of their data in the future when it makes sense
  to do so.

  There is no decline button, and no obligation to answer yet.  Existing
  Contributor Voluntary Re-licensing is for those who wish to accept the
  terms and get on with mapping.

  We'll be publishing which users have accepted so that we can all see
  the progress in terms of users and re-licensed data.

  We hope that you will accept the new Contributor Terms [2] and ODbL
  for each of your user accounts if you have more than one.



  ** Why are we doing it like this? **


  What ifs, what ifs. The key is clearly to reduce these. Those that
  simply want to get on mapping and accept that we won't doing anything
  daft, can sign up.    Those that are worried about data loss and that
  the OSMF will make a stupid decision,  can wait and see.  We'll show
  how much of the database is potentially covered by the ODbL. We've got
  some help on modelling that, and we'll aim for at least a weekly
  update if not daily. We'll also make all the data available needed to
  calculate that, so if you want to try a different metric or just see
  what is happening in your local area, everything will be transparent.

  If you support the share-alike concept, I urge you to accept the new
  Contributor Terms which provides for a coherent Attribution,
  Share-Alike license written especially for databases.  If you are a
  Public Domain license supporter, we are divided as a community on
  which is best and I do urge you to give this one a good try.  The
  Contributor Terms are expressly written to allow us to come back in
  future years and see what is best  without all this fuss about
  procedure.  And if you'd just really like all this hoo-haa to go away
  and get back to mapping, well, please say yes.



  ** Some supporting notes:  **


  () The key thing is that there are about 12,500 contributors who have
  contributed over 98% of the pre-May data.

  () I personally really, really want to get a coherent license in place
  so that my mapping efforts are more widely used. I also really, really
  don't want us as a community to shoot ourselves in the head and
  divide.  I pledge to continue working with *both* objectives in mind.

  () The License Working Group will not recommend switching over the
  license if data loss is unreasonable [3]. We will issue a formal
  statement to that effect and are attempting to define better what
  "unreasonable" means. A totally quantitative criteria is extremely
  difficult to define ahead of actually seeing what specific problems
  may arise. But I understand the concern that we are tempted to do
  something wild.

  () The License Working Group will ask the OSMF board to issue a
  similar statement.

  () We are working to create a process whereby we can model on a
  regular basis how much of the OSM database is covered by ODbL and how
  much not.  We will make all the data needed to do that public so that
  anyone can analyse using their own metrics. Work on this is active and
  being discussed on the dev mailing list. You will need:

  - An ordinary planet dump.
  - Access to history data. A public 18GB "history dump" is available
  http://planet.openstreetmap.org/full-experimental/full-planet-100801.osm.bz2.
  The intent is to make this available on a regular basis with difffs. A
  full re-generation takes several days.
  - A list of userids of who has and has not accepted the license. Work
  in progress.

  () A final vote on whether to switch or not remains an option. But let
  us see first if "data loss" really is an issue and what the specific
  problems might be.

  Regards to all,
  Mike
  License Working Group

  [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License/Implementation_Plan#PHASE_2_-_Existing_Contributor_Voluntary_Re-licensing_.28started_10th_August_2010.29

  [2] The new Contributor Terms:

  http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Contributor_Terms_Summary - Summary

  http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Contributor_Terms - Full
  text and links to translations

  [3] https://docs.google.com/View?id=dd9g3qjp_76gwvhpcx3 License
  Working Group minutes, see Item 7

  _______________________________________________
  Talk-au mailing list
  Talk-au at openstreetmap.org
  http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au


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