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

Anthony osm at inbox.org
Mon Jan 18 21:50:48 GMT 2010


On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 10:57 AM, SteveC <steve at asklater.com> wrote:

> I'm personally thinking at this stage that a better solution would be for
> the license move to ODbL to include a fork as part of the agreement, so
> everyone contributes their data as both ODbL and/or PD, not just move to
> ODbL. We could host a PD or CC0 server alongside the ODbL one and just see
> which dataset grows more quickly. I think Google and others will quickly
> rape the PD server while the ODbL server will have a process which is either
> manual or automated to pull in the PD data and will always be the better
> map. Would that make the PD crowd happy?


As long as it's hosted on a server which doesn't contains a Terms of Service
asserting that people agree to the ODbL, I guess it's a start.  If you
decide to do it, CC0 would be a much better choice than PD.

But it'd probably cause nothing but headaches for OSM.  Which site will new
users go to by default?  How are you going to phrase the question which asks
people which one they want?  Which data shows up by default on the main
page?  I really can't see this becoming more than a half-hearted effort,
which is perhaps worse than no effort at all.


> Personally I don't see it as much different to just working for Google and
> TomTom for free.
>

As opposed to just working for GeoFabrik and CloudMade for free?  C'mon.
Releasing the data into the public domain helps out a lot more than *just*
Google and TomTom.  In fact, it helps out all the people and organizations
that releasing data under the ODbL does, *plus* lots of other people and
organizations too.  Plus you get whatever benefit you get which convinced
you to contribute in the first place.

So no, you're not *just* working for Google and TomTom for free.  But you
are helping Google and TomTom for free, so if you think Google and/or TomTom
are evil, then I can see why you might not want to release your
contributions into the public domain.  Personally (without naming names) I
can think of much better examples than Google and TomTom, of companies that
I'd rather not help out.  So I'm not sure if I'd find such a PD fork
acceptable or not.

If you're going to run a fork, why not run a fork under CC-BY-SA?  That
would be something a lot more useful, as it's a fork you're already
implicitly creating anyway.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20100118/1c994232/attachment.html>


More information about the talk mailing list