[OSM-talk] Community vs. Licensing

[Ed Loach]

Chris wrote:

> I think this is an argument for Public Domain. 
> 
> As far as I understand the licenses, nobody is permitted to fork
the 
> OSM data without permissions, and it is thus not truly "open":
> - with CC-BY-SA, you'd have to ask every contributor the
permission 
> to fork their data (or is only attribution needed? To whom then?
The 
> individual contributors?)

Which is why (IMO) switching to a PD licence would require starting
from (almost) scratch; while there are some contributors who would
be willing to offer their work as PD, there is far too much stuff in
the current database with attribution requirements. (My reason for
quoting Chris above is the "is only attribution needed" question,
which wouldn't as I understand it make the resulting licence public
domain.) 

It is also (again IMO) why whatever the CT may suggest the project
will have to stay with a licence which supports attribution in the
future. 

CC-BY-SA is what we all agreed to when we started mapping with OSM;
we were happy with the attribution and sharealike aspects of the
project. Depending when we joined we might be aware that CC licences
aren't really suitable for data (and as a result a few people are
treating it in some jurisdictions as PD from what I've read
previously), and that there was no other licence at the time that
was suitable. So -by-sa defines the spirit of the project, and the
new ODBL licence provides a basis to make that work in reality (I
say this based on the assumption that the OSMF and Open Database
Commons lawyers know what they are doing). (As an aside, I do think
Open Database Commons should have called the licence ODC-BY-SA in
case they later come up with -BY and PD variants). As far as I can
see the only problem is with the contributor terms which I think
should make clear the project can't really switch away from a
licence that maintains any attribution requirements of source data).


Ed