[OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 begins Sunday

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

David Murn wrote:
> What about if you become aware that once youve got someone, who has
> agreed and who has contributed tainted data?  Will you (or someone else
> wielding the magical OSMF+3 wand) reverse it?

If data is "tainted" in a way that makes in incompatible with the 
currently used license then it will have to be removed in order not to 
put the project at risk (e.g. data copied from proprietary sources). 
This is independent of the license change.

If data is "tainted" in a way that makes it compatible with the 
currently used license, but it is likely that the data will have to be 
removed should OSM ever change to a different license under the CT "2/3 
of active mappers" clause, then things are difficult - it would 
certainly be better in the long run to replace such data by data that is 
fully compliant, and I would estimate tools to be developed that would 
aim to gradually phase out such limited-release data and make sure such 
data is not used to "build upon" if it can be avoided. But I don't think 
it would be removed outright - I guess the decision will be delayed 
until such time as anyone actually proposes changing the license again.

There's also a third kind of "tainted" that sits in the middle of these 
two, namely data that has e.g. been released CC-BY. Such data looks 
compatible at first, but closer inspection (see current discussion on 
legal-talk) reveals that CC-BY explicitly forbids sublicensing, and 
sublicensing is what the new scheme is all about. So in that case we'd 
have a legal outcome (data being distributed with attribution) but an 
untidy process that took us there. I don't know if this is a minor 
problem that can be ignored, or a showstopper.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"