[OSM-talk] Legal discussion on talk@

[Frederik Ramm]

Liz,

Liz wrote:
> If a poster wishes to spread a message more widely to the community, they 
> should be quite free to do so.

That's basically the same argument that we had for ages on Usenet groups 
where people would post offtopic messages because they wanted to reach 
the target audience.

The problem is: The system is there to balance your right to say 
something and the receiver's right to not be bothered by what you have 
to say.

Someone who is interested in legal topics is invited to join legal-talk. 
Someone who isn't should not have to deal with legal topics, no matter 
how important the author thought they would be.

I fully agree that this is a difficult situation *especially* with 
regard to the license change discussion because it has far-reaching 
consequences, much unlike some "can I do X under the Y license" debate. 
I had people complain on talk-de that they were not informed; when 
pointed at 2 years' worth of legal-talk discussion they said "do I look 
like a legal-talk subscriber?".

But at the same time, as we have seen, in an environment where everyone 
thinks that what he has to say is so damn important, we quickly reach 
the point where everyone else just goes "meh".

Maybe we could have a weekly, or bi-weekly, "legal-talk digest" posted 
to the talk list. Written by someone who quietly observes, and perhaps 
picks a few exemplary links: "This week on legal-talk: New insights on 
the legality of mapping military areas in Russia (link), possible 
modification to contributor terms of new license to enhance CC-BY 
compatibility (link), and heated discussion about whether Steve Coast's 
  descendants can legally inerhit the BDFL title (link)."

I don't think that the powers-that-be would object to such a digest. It 
would only require someone to do it.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"