[OSM-talk] Community vs. Licensing

[David Fawcett]

A nice breath of clarity...

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 3:04 AM, Ed Loach <ed at loach.me.uk> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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