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

[Patrick Kilian]

>>> 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.
Sure it is. If I learn something, I own my knowledge and my description
of it. I don't own the street or might not be able to distribute my
knowledge if my source is there are restrictions on my source.
And sure enough somebody else could have come up with his or her own
valid description of the real world which they would own. But they
didn't. So it's MY DATA. (And I don't take it kindly if somebody tries
to take it away from me.)


> 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?
The mappers in the US who feel like me but haven't spoken up (yet).


>> 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.
So we map for different reason, fine. But that doesn't give you the
right to circumvent the license terms on MY DATA. And to stop you from
doing that I want to switch away from the broken CC-BY-SA license.


> 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".
Why?


> 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.
You don't have to. But if I ask how you created your nice business cards
I would really appreciate a short answer in the form of "I used software
$foo and elevation data from source $bar to generate the hillshading".


> 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).
For somebody without time or knowledge you sure are very loud....

And Creative Commons didn't tear OBbL but said "CC-BY-SA doesn't apply
to data just use CC0 and you are fine".


Patrick "Petschge" Kilian