[OSM-talk] License plan

[Ulf Lamping]

Tobias Knerr schrieb:
> Frederik Ramm wrote:
>> I have never mapped anything thinking 
>> "hey, maybe someone else is going to make a nice map from this that I 
>> can then use". Not one single time. I don't know if that makes me an 
>> exception. Most people I talked to were enthusiastic about the data 
>> being collected, and were talking about cool things *they* could do with 
>> the data, but I might be moving in the wrong circles ;-)
> 
> My (completely unscientific) observation is that liberal opinions about
> licensing (esp. PD-advocacy) are more common with people who actually
> write software / make map styles / do other "advanced" things with OSM
> data. Support for liberal licensing also appears to be more prevalent on
> the mailing lists than anywhere else in the project.

I'm writing OSS (and being involved in JOSM devel) for quite a while. 
Most of the time I was talking with other developers about licensing 
results that the GPL was the preferred way to go. Your milage may vary.

As Frederik (and other people) prominently advocating PD on our lists 
doesn't mean that this is common sense throughout the developers or 
"makers" community.

> One possible explanation might be that these "liberals" have experienced
> the problems of incompatible licenses etc. themselves. However, I'm
> starting to think that there's something else: If people are able to
> create cool OSM stuff themselves, they care most about licensing not
> getting in their way. 

Personally, I'm preferring the copyleft idea, as that's what I've seen 
to be the most benefit return for me - in the long run.

The very unfortunate thing here is simply that there's no golden rule to 
choose as there's no "GPL for data" (as GPL is common in software 
development), so we have incompatible data licenses get in our way - 
which is very, very sad indeed.


However, I've spend a lot of effort in OSM both with JOSM development 
and with mapping.

If OSM we're PD or BSD licensed, I certainly wouldn't have even started 
to spend an hour of my time ...

Regards, ULFL