[OSM-talk] Results from license debate - assing (c) to OSMF

[Ulf Lamping]

Steve Coast schrieb:
> My understanding was that there is confusion over whether you need to  
> attribute all 9,000 OSMers if you use the data, or OSMF, or  
> 'OpenStreetMap' or 'OpenStreetMap.org' or 'the OSM project'...... or  
> what? That is all I was trying to fix.
>   
A sensible term you'll often find in open source projects is something 
like "OpenStreetMap.org and contributors", which is a bit lengthy but 
expresses two things:
- OpenStreetMap.org is the point to get more information, ask questions, ...
- clearly states that it is a community project
> At the moment the signup page says you license your work under CC-BY- 
> SA, but not that you license it /to/ anyone.
>
> So, really, planet.osm should attribute all 9,000 people as I  
> understand it. What I was trying to do was get a way so that people  
> using our data can just attribute something simple and not all 9,000  
> people. My intention when I picked the license 3 years ago was that  
> people would attribute OSM, not 9,000 people. It's a lot to list on a  
> map.
>
> My understanding is that the simplest way to do this is to ask  
> everyone to grant rights to OSMF somehow to do this. I haven't fully  
> thought this through :-)
>   
You might "get away with it" by using the above copyright notice and 
pointing to a web page that lists all contributors (listed by name if 
known and the remaining 1321 "anonymous" contributors). Putting all 
names on a printed map is probably not such a good idea. For obvious 
reasons: Having a map containing more contributor names than actual map 
data would be a bit strange ;-)
> I'm not trying to be evil, I'm not trying to change the license, I'm  
> not trying to take rights away from people. I was trying to take one  
> step towards smoothing things out. If I got it wrong, fine. If it  
> won't work like this, fine.
>
> I was hoping that we could start by taking some small steps like this
I do understand that this can be problem and I don't think that anyone 
would have real problems with it, if it's done sensible. However, really 
asking each of the 9000 contributors is of course the "clean way" of 
doing it.

Regards, ULFL