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

[Anthony]

On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 4:12 AM, Patrick Kilian <osm at petschge.de> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> > I live in the United States.  I can do whatever the heck I want with the
> > OSM database.  Now you want me to agree to a contract limiting those
> > rights.  So I'll ask again:  What's in it for me?
> My data. The streets I mapped. The trails I mapped. The POIs I mapped.
> The Indonesian islands I traced from aerial imagery. All that and all
> the data I'm going to add. For free and in my spare time and with the
> assumptions that I would get credit for it. Not personally but in the
> form of "this dataset was collected by the collaborators of the OSM
> project".


Well, first of all, that's not "your data".  That's data, which you happened
to discover.  Just because you discovered something doesn't mean you own
it.  Secondly,


> Nearly all of my data doesn't concern the US and is totally
> uninteresting to you.


So I ask again, what's in it for me?

> If the copyright law in you're place allows you to take my
> data and use it with out attributing me and my fellow mappers I consider
> it broken. And if the copyright law was that broken in the whole world I
> would never have invested as much time as I have.

And I say the opposite.  If the copyright law was so broken that one had to
keep a chain of attribution every time one learned of a fact, I would have
never been interested in OSM in the first place.

But attribution, collectively, to OSM, isn't really my problem.  If it was
as simple as writing "some data from OSM" next to any map I created, I'd be
perfectly fine with it.

One big problem, and the biggest change I can find from CC-BY-SA, is "4.6
Access to Derivative Databases."  Sure, some will claim that it's a
"feature" that I can't print out maps which mix OSM data and non-OSM data
without "offer[ing] to recipients of the [...] Produced Work a copy in a
machine readable form of [...] A file containing all of the alterations made
to the Database or the method of making the alterations to the Database
(such as an algorithm), including any additional Contents, that make up all
the differences between the Database and the Derivative Database".

Actually, I was planning on doing exactly this with a map of my office on
the back of my business card.  I'm not about to start handing out CDs along
with my business cards.

The other big problem is that I just don't have the time or money to figure
out *exactly* what the ODbL means.  And Open Data Commons is just not anyone
I've ever heard of (and Creative Commons, who *is* someone I've heard of,
and respect the legal opinion of, has torn apart the ODbL).
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