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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 4:53 AM, Anthony <osm at inbox.org> wrote:
> Well, you may think Creative Commons is "stupid", but I hope others will
> give them a chance and listen to what they have to say.  I think they will,
> considering that Creative Commons is well known and respected, compared to
> Open Data Commons, who doesn't even seem to have an article on Wikipedia.

I also tend to side with Creative Commons. It is not very wise of ODbL 
proponents to claim that CC say that CC-BY-SA doesn't work for data 
without also admitting that CC recommend CC0 for data.

Matt Amos wrote:
> i have listened to what they have to say, and it makes perfect sense.
> they recognise that databases like OSM's don't have much basis for
> protection in copyright law, so they correctly deduce that there are
> two options:
> 
> 1) drop requirements enforced by copyright law. this results in a
> "PD-like" license, to whit: CC0.
> 2) enforce requirements by law other than copyright law. this results
> in a database rights/contract license, to whit: ODbL.
> 
> creative commons decided, as a policy, that option (1) was preferable,
> as it places fewer restrictions on the use of the data. however, it
> drops the share-alike and attribution requirements. they clearly felt
> that this would provide the best benefit to the scientific community.

This "as a policy" is something that Steve claims as well, implying that 
rather than working things out, they just decreed something. But I don't 
think this does them justice, and anyone who has followed legal-talk 
should know. They claim to have invested considerable brainpower in 
finding a share-alike license (or, at least, an attribution license) for 
data that works, and failed. One of the big obstacles they saw was 
endless attribution chains. There was a posting in John Wilbanks' blog 
about this:

http://network.nature.com/people/wilbanks/blog/2007/12/17/open-access-data-boring-but-important

Proponents of the ODbL are of the opinion that CC simply were too 
skeptical, that a license which CC thought wouldn't be good enough is 
indeed good enough. But that's not a matter of "policy", that's a matter 
of judgment. You an accuse them of bad judgment but you cannot accuse 
them of blindly choosing a license "out of policy". Or if you do, then 
OSM sticking to share-alike is just the same kind of "policy".

The best rebuttal of the CC (or Science Commons, to be more precise) 
position came, like so often, from Richard Fairhurst, here:

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2009-March/002317.html

In short, he says that Science Commons was thinking too much about 
research and education, and that thus their results may not necessarily 
apply to OSM. If your prime example of data is, say, a deciphered human 
genome, then it is understandable that you'd rather not have endless 
layers of some kind of viral license slapped onto that.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"