[OSM-talk] open data

[Robert Hart]

> Lars, I'm misunderstanding your post. What are you trying to say here,
> that
> OSM is simply a host for "our" data?

Yes, I believe so. In the world of software (and also in wikipedia), so I
presume also OSM, if some code/text/data is copyright, then that copyright
is held by the author of the data, unless explicitly transferred. 

When somebody adds data to a public project such as OSM, it is normally just
an agreement for it to be used subject to the license of that project. Very
few public projects insist, or even try to, get the copyright assigned to
them.

This means that a project cannot change its license unless it either a) gets
permission from every author (which is impossible for virtually any project
of meaningful size) or b) changes to a license that is considered
"compatible" - i.e. you could change from a non-attribution license to an
equivalent attribution license - although in reality this means that only
new data is covered by the new license.

For something like OSM, as much of the data is essentially independent of
each other, it wouldn't be out of the question to have multiple licenses
depending on the circumstances of the submitter. Might be more trouble than
it's worth though....

Rob



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