[OSM-talk] open data

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

On Friday 22 September 2006 17:04, Bruce Cowan wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 11:20 +0100, Andrew Findlay wrote:
> > Whatever makes the data most useful to most people. CC-BY may be the
> > least-worst option :-)
>
> Indeed, I also think that this may be the best of the CC licences in
> this case, as it means less difficuties for 3rd parties using our data.
>
> Getting a specific licence for us might be the best course of action.

Doing that could be a very bad course of action for three reasons:

- If it had a share alike clause it would cut OSM off from all the other free 
content under CC-BY-SA, CC-BY, BSD, etc. and "public domain" waivers

- On a similar note, we'd be unable to pull CC-BY-SA content into OSM, e.g. 
photos from flickr

- We'd need lots of money or pro bono work to make the license valid, and then 
test cases to reassure us all. We get this for free with licenses like the 
GPL and CC-BY-SA.

Regards,
Tom


-- 
The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
 - Kundera