[OSM-talk] Community vs. Licensing

[Russ Nelson]

This isn't about the license, but it's about choosing a license, and
why are we re-licensing.  Mostly it's about community, which is why
it's here and not on legal at .  Earlier, I wrote this, from my
perspective as the head of licensing at the Open Source Initiative:

--

One of the lessons learned from ten years of management of the Open
Source license space is that licenses don't matter; community does.
Yes, people get passionate about licenses, but *really* they're being
passionate about their community.

What is most important to OSM is not the license, but instead the
people.  The data may just as well be in the public domain.  The real
question then becomes: can somebody borrow your data and combine it
with their data faster than you can create it?  My own feeling is that
they cannot, so I am in favor of OSM being relicensed into the public
domain.

However, I have spoken with Steve Coast, founder of the project, and I
know that he is dead-set against public domain OSM data.  Thus, the
second best thing to do, if you're going to threaten to sue
infringers, is a license that clearly spells out what portions of the
data they can use freely, and what uses are considered infringing.
The ODbL does a good job of lining that out, and so I recommend that
you relicense to it.

--

I've re-thought this, and I think that the proper course of action,
which will do the least damage to the community, is to stay with
CC-By-SA.  First, because all the data in OSM is already licensed
under that license.  Second, because it will do minimum damage to the
community (the discussion here is evidence that the community WILL be
badly harmed by relicensing).  Third, because if the worst thing that
happens is that the CC-By-SA turns out to be unenforcible, then the
data will be in the public domain.  For the reasons I listed above,
that's not a bad thing.

Community first, license second.

-- 
--my blog is at    http://blog.russnelson.com
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