[talk-au] ODBL yet again, but from a pragmatic approach...

[James Livingston]

On 10/07/2010, at 9:18 AM, John Smith wrote:
> however due to
> the absence of requiring such a free license to be cc-by compatible
> (require some form of attribution) this then means any cc-by data
> would now have to be expunged from the system.

Only if the copyright holder hasn't agreed to the CTs. If you are importing any data into OSM, you either 1) have to be the copyright holder and agree to the CTs, gotten the copyright holder's permission to agree to the CTs on behalf of them, or 3) somehow gotten an exemption from having to agree to the CTs. I'm still trying to find out how you do (3).

If you have imported data you got from someone else (other than public domain), you can't legally agree to the CTs. Since I've imported some data into OSM under my main account, I can't strictly click I Agree on that account unless the changesets are moved to a different account.


> Currently we have a fair bit of cc-by data in the system, things like
> ABS boundaries and in turn any data derived from such data, but so far
> there is only assumptions on how much data is this exactly, especially
> in Europe where the assumption is the majority of data has been
> relicensed or is clean to begin with,

The big one in Europe is AND. Presumably they are going to get an exemption to the CTs, because they're definitely not going to agree to them for the same reason our governments aren't.



> while this wouldn't be completely devastating, we're not just talking ABS
> data, there is a lot more to it like points of interest and national
> parks and other such things.

More important than losing data we wouldn't otherwise have, if losing data that has replaced older stuff. Various people have gone around replacing the old PGS coastline with ABS-derived coastline - someone is going to have to go and re-import the PGS stuff if we lose CC-BY data. I know I've replaced a bunch of Yahoo-imagery derived data with stuff based on CC-BY data.


> Although I'm not sure what the point is of moving to another
> attribution/share-a-like license, if the TCs undermine this, unless of
> course the intent is to eventually force everyone to go to PD long
> term, but doing it on the sly hoping no one notices where things are
> headed.

If OSM does go ODbL, I'm tempted to propose PD re-licensing sometime after it settled down a bit (but not too settled) just to stir things up. From memory, someone has quoted 70% of people at SotM the other year as being happy to have their work PD - we only need a vote of OSMF (presumably >50% majority) and two thirds of "active mappers".

I'm sure that would go down *really* well, regardless of the outcome.