[OSM-talk] License

[Robert (Jamie) Munro]

OJW wrote:
> 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.  

I think it should have the option. If doing so makes the public data
better, why would you object? Musicbrainz (a philosophically similar
project) sells it's data to several commercial clients - forget "month
of OSM", they have a full time member of staff and a rented office.

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

A lot of people thing maps should be public domain, others think the
current licence is too permissive. Either way, we can't have the debate
unless the project is owned by a central entity.

> 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. 

I don't think deterrent to forking is a bad thing, so long as the
foundation can be prevented from "turning to the dark side" (see below).

> Worse, it 
> requires everyone to completely trust the OSMF.  Is a company's charter 
> sufficient protection for such an important dataset?

Sufficient protection could be ensured. That's a separate issue, but the
foundation should have a

The data cannot be retroactively closed. If you have a planet.osm from
before a theoretical future change of license, you can carry on using it
forever.

> 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)

Fixing holes in the current licence requires that we are able to change
it. This proposal is about allowing the licence to be changed.

> 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.

There are around 4800 contributors. It's ridiculous to list them all.

> 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)

If we are going to change the licence, the GPL or LGPL are probably good
options. We should make sure that we can change it.

Robert (Jamie) Munro

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