[OSM-talk] Using editors to indicate license preference.

[John Smith]

Currently there is a lot of debate over licenses, some people want to
change from cc-by-sa to odbl and yet others keep pushing for things to
go to public domain.

I was chatting with one such person in favour of PD on the phone
yesterday about this, one thought that occurred to me was to have data
tagged with license information, editors could potentially go about
this in a number of ways, explicitly tagging nodes, ways and relations
with the license chosen by the user, eg data:license=public_domain,
and warning PD advocates if they edit CC-BY-SA/ODBL information and
that the changes won't be public domain. When a person explicitly
wants ODBL/CC-BY-SA the license could be updated or stripped if it
matches the OSM default.

Alternatively the changeset could be tagged, but this would be a lot
more difficult for editors to "know" what is PD and what isn't if the
changeset contains a mix of both.

While I personally favour a share alike type license, some don't and
this might be a way to make the majority of people happier.