[Talk-de] Hello from England

SteveC steve at asklater.com
Do Jul 2 15:42:00 UTC 2009


On 2 Jul 2009, at 15:10, Jochen Topf wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 02, 2009 at 12:57:10PM +0100, SteveC wrote:
>> On 2 Jul 2009, at 07:37, Jochen Topf wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 01:55:43PM +0100, SteveC wrote:
>>>> The license is interesting, because if you think about it and I was
>>>> evil then I would join the people who like the public domain.  
>>>> Because
>>>> then it would be much easier for my company, and others, to do what
>>>> they liked with the data and kill OSM. Instead we have taken the
>>>> harder path because I think it is much better for the long term
>>>> survival and health of the project to have a reciprocal license.
>>>
>>> A great! We are falling back into medieval language now. Public
>>> domain is evil.
>>> Its not an option we can seriously discuss. Its evil and everbody
>>> who is for
>>> public domain is evil. End of discussion. Glad we cleared that up.
>>
>> As you know, I didn't say that.
>>
>>> Weren't you trying to get more communication going?
>>
>> Yeah and you just killed it, well done.
>
> I am sorry. I might have been confused by emails from you such as  
> these:
> http://www.mail-archive.com/legal-talk@openstreetmap.org/msg00805.html
> http://www.mail-archive.com/talk@openstreetmap.org/msg10052.html

That reflects my personal opinion that PD would be wrong for OSM. That  
doesn't reflect everyone in the legal working group, the fact that  
there are votes on this stuff, etc.

> Of course my logic was backwards and misrepresented what you were  
> saying and I
> apologize for that. So I'll try again: What you are saying is that  
> if you were
> evil you would be for PD,

Almost - I'm saying that people thought I was evil for pushing ODBL,  
but if I was really Evil and that was my motivation then it would be  
better for me to push PD so I could be evil with the data.

> but as you are not evil you might still be for PD and
> there might actually be valid reasons for beeing in favour of public  
> domain

Yes of course there are valid reasons. It's simpler for example. I  
also like the example that the BSD UNIX TCP/IP stack was the most used  
stack in the world because Microsoft could take it and incorporate it  
in to windows because it was BSD licensed, but they could not take  
other GPLd stacks. So in a way it had more impact than the 'more  
free' (from some perspective) Linux TCP/IP stack.

> and
> we should discuss them on an equal footing with going with the ODBL?

I think we already have, but we'd just be re-iterating the arguments.  
I continue to think that if OSM went PD, then I or Google or whoever  
will just take the data and improve it and not give back. OSM would  
always be the slightly worse map than everyone else. My personal  
feeling is that OSM should be the best map of the world and PD would  
give that away.

Like I said in the email you pointed to, if you fork OSM with a PD  
version, then OSM will just take all of your edits and put them in  
it's reciprocal version, or someone else will. I can tell you a lot of  
companies would love to relegate OSM to a cheap way for them to fix  
the map. It would be a dream come true for Tele Atlas to just take our  
data and not give anything back, and just use us as a bug fixing  
service.

I think we can be so much more.

Best

Steve





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