[OSM-talk] What could we do to make this licences discussion more inclusive?

Ben Last ben.last at nearmap.com
Thu Jul 29 07:35:07 BST 2010


Now that the dust has (hopefully) settled a little on this thread...

Whilst it's not actually in my job description to try and move forward on
how  NearMap deals with the proposed OSM licence change, I'm going to try
anyway.  Having trawled back through endless discussions, what I'm after are
responses (preferably by those actively engaged in pushing forward the
relicensing process) to these questions:
1. Is the ODbl fixed now, so that we can unleash expensive lawyers on an
analysis of it?
2. Are the new contributor terms fixed, so we know whether there are to be
any changes to the wording, *specifically the wording that covers future
changes to the licence*.
3. Is there a definition proposed for what constitutes a "free and open"
licence, with regard to the wording in the contributor terms about potential
changes to the licence.

As ever, we are *not* trying to influence the debate; NearMap aims to
support OSM and generation of mapping data.  But we have a whole bunch of
ongoing work (including a load of it that's on my personal to-do list) that
is heavily affected by the relicensing, and I'd like to try and get some
clarity.

Just to clarify; we don't (pending legal review) have any known problem yet
with ODbl, but we do have concerns over the potential for derived works
based on our data to be relicensed under some new, as yet undefined, licence
at some point in the future.

This posting also emailed (slightly changed) to legal at osmfoundation.org.

Cheers
Ben

-- 
Ben Last
Development Manager (HyperWeb)
NearMap Pty Ltd
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