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

James Livingston lists at sunsetutopia.com
Sat Jul 31 01:36:19 BST 2010


On 30/07/2010, at 3:54 PM, John Smith wrote:
> I've cc'd Grant on this email, he posted to the #osm-au IRC channel
> about some proposed changes to the CTs, which I was hoping would have
> come up in another thread by now:
> 
> "LWG is considering:
> 
> 3. OSMF agrees to use or sub-license Your Contents as part of a
> database and only under the terms of one of the following licenses:
> the Open Database Licence for the database and Database Contents
> Licence for the individual contents of the database; or the Creative
> Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence (version 2.0 or later)

I assume that giving the ODbL without a version number there means that it can be released under any version (upgrading to a later ODbL release is AIUI one of main reasons for the CTs).

Then it doesn't help at all - what if ODbL 1.1 says that you can freely relicense to CC-Zero? And if you think that can't happen, go look at the GNU Free Documentation Licence 1.3 and Wikipedia. That kind of legal hijinks is the only reason Wikipedia can be under a CC licence now.

Not even getting into the argument about who is allowed to define what a later version of the ODbL is.


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