[OSM-talk] License plan
Roland Olbricht
roland.olbricht at gmx.de
Tue Mar 3 22:47:29 GMT 2009
> Everything is up for debate.
For me, this license change resembles the EULA story with openSuse, see
http://zonker.opensuse.org/2008/11/26/opensuse-sports-a-new-license-ding-dong-the-eulas-dead/
and
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/opensuse-ends-eula
At least in Germany, this EULA story might had more impact on openSuse than
the cooperation of Microsoft and Novell. And it started as a clash of
cultures when Novell changed the Suse pages from the Suse way of organizing a
site to the Novell way of organizing a site.
A lot of end users have been trained to the following way of perceiving: a
screen mask that consists of several pages of scrollable text and then two
buttons "Yes" or "Abort" means
"We never warrant that any part of this software works. But we always let you
pay again when you do something we haven't planned."
no matter what's actually written in the text.
For a lot of people who are not primarly interested in law, this is
what "commercial" means.
So I would like to suggest the following:
1. Create a message like
---
We are trying to get out of the caveats and flaws of copyright law and
therefore need a new license. The final draft can be found at
http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/
and
http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/fil/
For non-law-experts, this means
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_Licence/Use_Cases
---
2. When a useful version of that message exists, request for as many
translations as possible. Even doing here on talk@ would be a good place.
3. After some days, make the thing available at every user login.
4. Don't start the license commit itself at most a month after this message
has been announced.
At least for those who perceive Yes-Abort-pages that way, this would much more
look like the behaviour of an "open" project.
And what to users who do not log in with a browser?
Cheers,
Roland
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