[OSM-talk] The OSM licence: where we are, where we're going

[A Morris]

I was at SOTM 2007. My recollection of the "show of hands" that allegedly
shows massive support for PD is as follows:

1. Problems with current licence were presented at length (especially
attribution requirement)
2. PD was presented as an alternative
3. Attendees were asked for a show of hands ("Who supports PD, who doesn't
support PD")

In other words, at no point was there any vote on, say, CCbySA vs some
not-yet-written-alternative-copyleft-data-license. Therefore I feel it is
not appropriate to say "copyleft fans are in the minority" based on this
flawed poll.

Had the vote been "Shall we write a new license that fixes the attribution
problem whilst retaining copyleft for the data" I am sure that would also
have resulted in an overwhelming show of hands.

Aled




On Jan 9, 2008 1:53 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> > I'd like to mention, as Frederik doesn't think there are many of us,
> > that I'm a strong supporter of copyleft.
>
> I just said that there weren't many copyleft supporters at SOTM 07. Has
> the license panel discussion ever reached audio publication? Because I
> believe the result of the show of hands was spoken so it should be on
> there. Not that this would mean a lot since it is very well possible
> that the folks at SOTM were not representative of the general OSM
> population. I just don't want people to have the impression that I am
> hallucinating when I say that the copyleft fans were a tiny minority.
>
> To be fair, I think that the reason why many at SOTM said they'd favour
> PD over copyleft is that the question was raised after a panel debate on
> licensing during which people were alerted to many of the problems we
> face with our *current* license, including the fact that nobody knows
> whether it holds any water, legally, at all; many may have approved of
> PD out of sheer exhaustion ("well if nothing else works then let's just
> move on"). Presented with a *viable* way of achieving copyleft, they
> might have said something else.
>
> But this is all idle speculation; it would not be too hard to ask our
> contributors.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20080109/dd4a4b5d/attachment.html>