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

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 16 April 2011 10:29, Frederik Ramm <frederik en remote.org> wrote:
> On 04/16/2011 02:05 AM, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
>> At this point it's only known that there's an unspecified non-zero
>> part of the community which wants OSM to switch license.  Not everyone
>> needs to be true to that part of the community just like not everyone
>> needs to be true to the part that wants OSM data in Public Domain or
>> the part that drinks coffee with milk etc.
>
> Let us try and separate the issue of license change from the issue of the CT
> for a moment. Let us assume that there was no immediate license change
> planned; that OSMF intended to continue using CC-BY-SA for now; and that
> they only sought CT agreement from mappers, in order to make a potential
> future license change easier.
>
> The CT contain this clause whereby it becomes impossible to do what Dermot
> writes above - if 2/3 of mappers agree to use another free and open license,
> then that is the new license and everyone's data is changed to that new
> license.
>
> I think that *that* is the major change here,

Yes.

> and I have outlined in the
> past that I believe that you cannot be a part of a crowdsourced mapping
> effort if you consider your contribution to be only "rented out" to the
> project. If you want to participate in OSM, where all the time others will
> build upon your work, then you cannot sensibly say "but if you decide to
> change your license later I might choose to take away my contribution". If
> you contribute to OSM, you pour a glass of water into an ocean. You cannot
> wrap that in plastic and label it "yours". I made a comparison with
> voluntary work in real-life communities; if you have spent a lot of time and
> love helping to build a nice playground for the village school but later the
> whole school decides to adopt some pedadogic direction of which you don't
> approve and you put your kid elsewhere, you cannot tear town the playground.
> It wouldn't be right (and it would be very unlikely to make you happy).
>
> Now if someone says "I'm willing to sign the CT on the condition that before
> OSMF switches to ODbL, they execute the exact license change procedure
> outlined in the CT, with asking 2/3 of active mappers etc.", then this is
> something I can understand and respect.
>
> I do however have the impression that there are some people for whom calling
> for a public vote is just another means to delay and hopefully derail the
> process, and secretly they never intended to continue supporting the project
> after a license change anyway.

That's possible but unlikely.  There are some reasons why the vote
would have been rather useless (which have been outlined in this
thread) but they're not really obvious and that's why perhaps it's
hard to realise.

>
> I have a suggestion, one which we could implement in true crowdsourced
> spirit and without any OSMF involvement. We simply draw up a document that
> is basically a modified version of the current contributor terms, which says
> "I am willing to make the following contract with OSMF on the additional
> condition of OSMF holding the 2/3 vote as described below before they change
> from ODbL to CC-BY-SA". We then devise some sort of sufficiently legally
> binding way for people to "sign" this document. Everyone who thinks that the
> CT are ok in principle but who would like a proper vote first, signs this
> document instead of the "real" CT.

But now you're talking about the license switch from CC-By-SA to ODbL
only and taking for granted that the switch from "linux model" to "FSF
model" is obviously good for the project.  Here are some reasons why
people might oppose that switch in the first place, and not because
they find it fun to troll mailing lists, but because they want the
project to succeed.  I'm personally quite ambivalent of ODbL and
CC-By-SA because the issues that decide which license would be better
for us, are so complex.

* The cost of switching is too high -- the community split, the
banning of a part of current mappers from mapping, the loss of data
that is already in our database.  It's simply quite late for the
switch with the little benefit that it brings.

* Under the new CTs (some versions of the document anyway... still
seems to be in flux), you may not be able to use (in OSM) data that
has been built on top of our OSM data by others.  For some of us this
means a failure of the share alike clause.  It's probably similar in
case of the FSF-hosted projects and mozilla/apache projects, but for
the majority of projects I know as free/open it would mean a failure.

* Other potential or real issues in the CTs, which is a contract
written by non-lawyers.  Mistakes have been found in both the CT and
the ODbL texts (and obviously in CC-By-SA text before that) after they
started to be in use.

* People in the "status quo fork" group are convinced that the current
model with no CTs and the CC-By-SA is good enough.  Taking the village
school playground example, it's not like they are saying the current
way of teaching is the only correct way.  But they restrict the choice
of teaching methodologies in that volunteer built school to those
developed by a group they trust and which is expert in that field
(CC), and that should be enough to keep up with the evolution in
didactics.  Instead of leaving it completely up to whoever the current
teachers are.

Cheers