[OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

[Andy Allan]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 12:40 AM, MP <singularita at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Yes. At least when you expect 100000 people to go along and the issue
>> has the potential to break OSM apart, it would not be a bad idea to send
>> monthly information about the state of things.
>
> Hmm ... perhaps sometimes it would be good to mass-email all members
> when it is about changes with possibly devastating (mass deletion)
> effect. Not everybody reads various blogs or parts of wiki around OSM,
> but almost everybody reads their email.

Hang on, here's something which has been misunderstood. There's a good
reason that we haven't emailed all 100,000 people yet. We're not sure
whether the OSMF endorses the new license, which is itself still in a
draft. If you look at the license plan (
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Implementation_Plan
) you'll see it comes in the following stages:

1) Make the plan and the draft public. Ask for feedback.
2) Wait for feedback to be taken into account and expect/hope for a
final version of the ODbL
3) See if the OSMF board approves
4) See if OSMF members like what results
5) If they do, then start asking the rest of the community

*So we're at point 1*. We've always assumed that if you're the kind of
person who wants to be involved in drafting licenses, reviewing
incomplete licenses and so on you'll get involved. Most people
probably don't care. That's why legal-talk subscriptions aren't
compulsory in order to use the API.

If you feel left out of stage 3, then maybe you should become a member
of the OSMF. That's what it's there for. But again, not everyone is
interested in the running of the project, doing behind the scenes
stuff, holding the OSMF Board to account etc. Which is why OSMF
membership isn't compulsory either.

There's all chances that the OSMF members won't vote for the license,
in which case it won't be put to the community at all Or maybe they
will. The way the plan is seems to me a sensible staged approach of
involvment - first the Board, then the Members, then the community at
large. It needs to get through all three stages to work, and if any
group disapproves, it stops. And we involve the smallest group first,
then a bigger, then the biggest.

Now because things are being done publicly, lots of people who are
only interested in stage 5 think that we've skipped a few stages.
Maybe we've found some people who want to be invovled in stage 1 who
didn't realise until now that they did. Good. It's nice to have more
people interested.

Cheers,
Andy