[OSM-talk] License

[OJW]

On Thursday 01 February 2007 13:19, Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote:
> After reading that page, does anyone have an objection to the "grant of
> rights" idea?

What's the purpose of it, other than giving NPEMaps and others a method of 
circumventing the openstreetmap license?  

It seems to imply that OSMF "should" be selling our data as a proprietary 
product, so that when it appears in a book or magazine we can't even 
photocopy the map, let alone the article.  

It seems to be encouraging the development of non-free media (or 
public-domain, that can easily be converted to non-free).  

e.g. the very project (npemaps) used as an example on that page distributes 
one of its main datasets (the map tiles) under a non-free license that's 
incompatible with openstreetmap data.

The proposal seems to cause problems when forking the project, by treating the 
OSMF as "special" and giving it rights that nobody else has.  Worse, it 
requires everyone to completely trust the OSMF.  Is a company's charter 
sufficient protection for such an important dataset?

It seems to claim that people can already circumvent our license by using OSM 
data as a collective work, but the proposal makes no attempt to fix that (CC 
data would still be available)

It seems to take a simple problem (we need a credits page listing people 
who've worked on the map or an API listing who's worked on an area) and turn 
that into a requirement for a whole new distribution method.

Even if such a change were possible (we just throw away the existing data?) 
then why is this "geocities-style" EULA preferable to something simple like 
GNU GPL (where the vector data would be treated as source code, and where all 
recipients of the data have equal rights to use it)