[OSM-talk] about freedom in PD/BSD/MIT/Apache (was: The long tail - lowest common denominator)
Lars Aronsson
lars at aronsson.se
Fri Jul 7 23:59:07 BST 2006
Immanuel Scholz wrote:
> I do not agree to any non-viral license.
On the other hand, I can agree to almost anything. I do
appreciate the recursive elegance of GPL and the power it has
demonstrated in cases like Opentom.org. But in my mind, it is a
bigger lack to have a license that we cannot enforce than having
one that is non-viral. And what chances do we really have to
*fight and win* against anybody who breaks our current license?
Selling the TomTom based on the Linux kernel without releasing the
source code for the device drivers was clearly a breach of the
GPL, and the company was forced to comply. But are mash-ups of
OSM and Google Maps a breach of our license? If we would release
planet.osm in the public domain, we wouldn't have to worry. If we
require a viral license, how do we define what's allowed and how
do we realistically fight any violations? And is our time, money
and effort well spent in such fights?
If the license statement is there only for aesthetic reasons, we
could just as well claim that all data must be submitted "in the
spirit of chairman Mao", or any similar nonsense.
> For a public domain (or BSD, Apache...) license, I feel like
> "just another data source for some big company". I have this
> picture of some manager in mind, looking at OSM and says to
With this reasoning, I don't really understand how you draw the
line to the "NC" component of the CC license. What if the
marketing guy says "wait, they have a CC-SA license" and then they
find a way to comply with that, just like Red Hat Linux complies
with GPL or like the publisher Directmedia Gmbh in Berlin complies
with GFDL when they publish the German Wikipedia on DVD. What if a
company complies with the viral license and still makes a lot of
money from our unpaid work, is that ok?
I personally think that it will be a very long time before any
company big enough to have a marketing guy would prefer to use map
data from OSM over buying it from the likes of TeleAtlas. In the
foreseeable future, say 5 years, the only realistic uses for OSM
data are web applications and amateur hacks that can't afford
TeleAtlas map data. That might seem limited, but I think it still
is an important goal. The commercial scenario you describe, that
would perhaps make a difference between a viral license and public
domain publishing, just doesn't seem very realistic to me.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
More information about the talk
mailing list