[OSM-talk] License plan

[Roland Olbricht]

> 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