[OSM-talk] Opinion poll about the new licence Odbl 1.0

Ed Avis eda at waniasset.com
Tue Dec 8 06:22:12 GMT 2009


Anthony <osm <at> inbox.org> writes:

>What about dual licensing under CC-BY-SA and ODbL?  That way you can keep the
>CC-BY-SA contributions.Of course, it doesn't make much sense, because the whole
>point of ODbL is that it's more restrictive than CC-BY-SA.

It makes a little bit of sense: the ODbL does have looser attribution
requirements and would (I believe) make it possible to produce public domain map
tiles, rather than having them CC-BY-SA.  That might open up a few new
applications or encourage a few companies which have been reluctant to use the
data under CC to start using it under ODbL.  (Though personally I doubt that many
will - legal departments frightened by Creative Commons licences are unlikely to
look kindly on the much more legalistic ODbL.)

I think it would be a better transition, though - start using ODbL in parallel
now, and if at some point in the future CC-BY-SA licensing is shown to cause
real problems with enforcing share-alike (which on all available real-world
evidence so far looks unlikely, but I'm told the possibility exists) then there
could be a separate decision to move to ODbL only (which would not require
deleting people's data).

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>





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