[OSM-talk] It's all too fast...

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Andy Allan wrote:
> We've been talking about the ODbL for a loooong time now, way more
> than 18 months. It's not completely new. The previous draft was dated
> April 2008. If you're new to the discussions, then welcome, but don't
> make like the ODbL has never been seen before and that we're trying to
> do everything in 1 month.

The previous draft was published in April 2008 and there was virtually 
no two-way communication with those who worked on it. We gathered on 
legal-talk, we asked questions, we put up use cases, and most of them 
were not seriously discussed by *anyone* from the license working group; 
we had no feedback from *any* of the lawyers involved, and no interim 
versions of the license. Even the OSMF board did not know anything until 
some time in January. If you look at the legal-talk archives it may look 
like there were people talking about the license but the truth is that 
there was virtually no overlap between those who worked on the license 
(and talked to lawyers) and those who discussed on the list. It is fair 
to say that there has been next to zero community involvement in 
producing the 0.9 draft.

Now we have a new draft, where certain things have changed. Nobody 
involved with creating the draft has wasted *one* *single* *minute* to 
explain which changes have been made and why. The legal counsel's 
response to our "use cases" on the Wiki is thin, to say the very least. 
Many things that could be clarified within minutes in a proper dialogue 
have been drawn out to last months - for example, if the legal counsel 
did not understand something about our use cases, it would have been 
trivial for me or anyone else on the list to explain; instead we now 
read "I would need someone to talk me through this". Words that probably 
have been sitting in that document for two months before we even saw it, 
and words that will sit there for another two months before someone 
finds the time to talk them through it and get a response.

The recently quoted discussion on odc-discuss about share-alike 
extending to interim derived databases (something we all took for 
granted) seems to show that there are either major intentional 
differences between the April 08 draft and the just released 0.9, or 
that serious oversight was involved in preparing 0.9.

The fact that the new license is to be hosted by a body known as Open 
Data Commons is at most 2 months old (because the December board meeting 
still said "hosting options unknown, OSMF may need to host"); given that 
whoever is hosting the license has far-ranging powers over the license, 
this is not something to tick off lightly.

I'm all in favour of ODbL but I currently cannot by the life of me see a 
way how it could ever be put in force along the timeline published.

Bye
Frederik

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