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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Anthony wrote:
> 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.

I think you are only required to hand out the database on which your 
rendering is based. And it doesn't even have to be the database at the 
time; you can hand out a current version. And you don't even have to 
hand it out fully, it is enough to hand out a diff to the original data 
if that is still available. So if you took OSM data and didn't change it 
(which I think is likely), then your diff is empty, and all you have to 
do is point people to planet.openstreetmap.org if anyone should ever ask 
you for the data.

> 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).

I wouldn't exactly say "torn apart". In fact, one of the biggest problem 
that they had with ODbL was that Open Data Commons offered this license 
as a general share-alike license suitable for data, and by doing so was 
challenging the Creative Commons quasi-hegemony in the department of 
open licensing. In this message:

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2009-March/002315.html

John Wilbanks of Science Commons writes, "If this were the "Open Street 
Map License" and not the "Open Database License" it's unlikely we would 
have such a strong opinion."

And in

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2009-March/002318.html

the same guy says:

"Your community cares more about reciprocity than interoperability.
That's fine and dandy for you. But you're proposing to promote your
solution, a complex one engineered and tuned for you, as something that
is a generic solution *without doing the research* as to how it will
work in generic situations. That's not fine and dandy."

I think he's perfectly right; ODbL was very much influenced by OSM, much 
as any product will be influenced by the first large user. But again, 
they didn't really "tear apart" ODbL, they were just unhappy about the 
prospect of more people in science and education using this license 
because that would reduce interoperability.

Which is undoubtedly true; no share-alike license can ever be as 
interoperable as CC0 or PD.

Bye
Frederik

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