[OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] License to kill

[Russ Nelson]

On Mar 5, 2009, at 1:10 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:

>  Also, the cost of staying with buggy old CC-BY-SA for a few months
> longer is rather negligible,

The barn down the road from me was standing on just four 9" beams.  We  
kept saying "Boy, that barn has some structural problems.  It could  
fall down at any time."  It didn't fall, and it didn't fall.  One  
might be tempted to think that one could go into the barn and pull one  
valuable things of one sort or another.  The barn finally fell down  
this winter.

If it's a bad idea to use the CC-BY-SA, it's a bad idea to use it for  
a few months longer.  Just because its barn hasn't fallen doesn't mean  
that the risk is not increasing.  Everybody knew that the Johnstown  
dam was going to go ... when it finally did, nobody paid attention  
because they didn't believe it actually HAD gone out.

But all this discussion is kinda pointless.  There are two things  
going on here: the ODbL is being drafted, and we're deciding whether  
the ODbL meets our needs (I say "our" because I joined the Foundation  
a few days ago.)  Until the ODbL is finished, we kinda have nothing to  
talk about.  Yes, the ODbL is being drafted with our specific needs in  
mind, so if the first published version doesn't meet our needs, we can  
go back to the well and ask for a revision.  But until the ODbL is  
finished, we're spinning our wheels.  Can we assume that the lawyers  
understand the problem and are working on a solution?

--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
russ at cloudmade.com - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson

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