[OSM-talk] [Announce] OSMF license change vote has started

[James Livingston]

On 06/12/2009, at 8:44 AM, Ulf Lamping wrote:

> Tom Hughes schrieb:
>> Polling the OSMF members is just the first stage - there will another 
>> vote later when all contributors will be asked whether they want to 
>> relicense.
> 
> With a gun at their head: "Refuse: After the migration (currently 26th 
> February 2010), your contributions will not be included in ODbL licensed 
> downloads and you will not be able to continue contributing.".
> 
> If you call this a vote, then we have pretty different understanding 
> about voting.

I'd say it isn't a vote, it's asking whether you agree to relicense your contributions under the ODbL subject to the Contributor Terms. I would imagine there are quite a few people who couldn't legitimately agree to that, even if they want the ODbL. Have you ever important any CC-BY(-SA) data using your account? If so, they I would think that you can't legally agree because you are not the copyright holder of all your contributions.

For example, I have inferred road positions from the CC-BY-licensed Queensland DCDB-lite dataset, and have uploaded national park and world-heritage areas from the CC-BY dataset on data.australia.gov.au. As I'm not the copyright holder of those base datasets, I don't see how I could agree to the relicensing, or contributor terms which allow for future relicensing.  Does that mean everything I've ever contributed (even my own work) has to be deleted? Probably.