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

Dair Grant dair at refnum.com
Thu Mar 5 10:56:23 GMT 2009


graham wrote:

> Please go with Gervase's suggested timetable instead. And build in some extra
> process for including results of discussion by non-english-speaking countries.

I know this is an unpopular view, but I disagree.

I rather we had an ODbL 1.0 in as short a time as possible, so that we could
look at it and decide if it is, or is not, what we want.

Disclaimer: I don't have any special insight into the licence process, would
have liked more feedback as it developed, and think (perhaps incorrectly)
that the point of having an OSMF is to inform us of things like this.


People have been talking about the licence issue for years (literally; there
was an hour-long panel about it at SOTM 2007), and we have nothing to show
for it other than a large number of "I'm not a lawyer, but..." threads.

We know there are issues with the current licence, and there will be issues
with ODbL 1.0 as well.

But having that in front of us, in a final form, gives us a choice: is this
suitable for what we want, or not?


In a perfect world we would know exactly what we want, the licence would be
drafted accordingly, and 1.0 could be adopted from day one. But we don't
know exactly what we want, and some of us want different things.

There's some overlap of course; the 1.0 needs to have some grounding in our
overall goal(s), but IMO two years of talking about a new licence needs to
come to a conclusion - or we should stop pretending that it ever will.

I would be happy to have a bad 1.0 out sooner which was rejected by OSM
(perhaps accepted by some other community, who knows), than a perfect 1.0
which never arrived.


Finalising a license and adopting it are two separate things - no matter
what timetable you pick for the former, the latter will take longer (since
someone will pop up and say "wait, we're doing what now?!?").

Even if we reject 1.0, we can still tackle problems like contacting people,
identifying how much data we'd need to redo if we take a strict line and say
data doesn't carry forward without explicit consent, etc.


-dair
___________________________________________________
dair at refnum.com              http://www.refnum.com/






More information about the talk mailing list