[OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement

[Lester Caine]

John Smith wrote:
> On 16 April 2011 17:37, Elizabeth Dodd<edodd at billiau.net>  wrote:
>> OpenOffice.org has had a major fork just recently. The LibreOffice fork
>> has chosen different licensing arrangements, including the contributors
>> retaining their own copyright.
>> http://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/developers/
>> and interestingly this assessment of how LibreOffice is going
>> http://webmink.com/2011/02/11/is-libreoffice-open-by-rule/
>> We can also note how the new fork is handling their compound
>> licensing issue.
>
> What's more interesting is Oracle's move to wash their hands of direct
> control over OpenOffice...
>
> http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/15/oracle_letting_openoffice_go/

Probably pertinent how current this move is ...
I think that the fact that the main development team simply moved over to 
LibreOffice was something Oracle had not anticipated, but is exactly what open 
source is about?

Unlike OO, OSM has a number of 'competitors' providing the same data, so a split 
is less likely to happen, but I do wonder if it isn't about time to readdress 
the area of merging data from different sources? Rather than throwing everything 
in the one pot and mangling it, creating a more open data interface so that 
third parties can supply feeds in much the same way as we use a range of 
background tiles at the moment. I am thinking directly here about paralleling 
the current OS data with OSM data.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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