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

Sat Apr 16 20:40:46 BST 2011

So hard to know which message to reply to in this very long chain.   I'll
try to pick out the main points in response to my message:

*Ordnance Survey Open Data*:  As far as I am aware our current licence etc
is compatible with the OS licence, so by changing ours, we are making a
conscious decision to move to a licence which *may* not be compatible with
OS's.   I understood from last time I asked about this that we were getting
some legal advice on it, but I have not seen a response.
As someone (Kevin I think) said, there are large chunks of the UK that
appear to have been traced from this data, so deleting it would be quite a
backwards step, and I would not support a course of action that would mean
deleting that data.
[The minor point about 'us' not being interested in what OS did a year ago
is not true for me - I, like several OSM people contributed to the
government consultation that resulted in the release of the data]

*Process*:  In my day job, if I want to implement a project I have to go
through a process with decision gates between stages - concept, development,
implementation etc.   In this process it feels like we are at the gate
between the development and implementation stages, but it is not at all
clear to me how we will make the decision that the damage to the dataset is
worth the benefit of the new licence.  [I accept that it may not be 'we' the
whole community that makes the final decision - it may be the LWG or the
OSMF board, I don't know].

It feels to me that the 'accept' button is my last hold on the process.   It
is not that I do not trust whoever is going to make the decision, but I do
not know who will make the decision, or what principles they will use to
make it.   If I knew this (especially the tolerance to data loss), I would
be happy to accept.   I am disappointed that we have got to this stage
without having such things specified.

I get the impression that most people responding to these queries are not
members of the LWG or OSMF board (my apologies if I am wrong) - a response
from people who are actually running the process, rather than well meaning
people who are not directly involved would be appreciated.

Regards

Graham.

On 16 April 2011 19:42, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
> On 04/16/2011 07:47 PM, Kevin Peat wrote:
>
>> Such as is it the LWG's intention to make the
>> license/ct's compatible with OS Opendata? If it isn't then all those
>> people currently tracing thousands of roads a week in the UK might as
>> well take a break and get some fresh air.
>>
>
> If people are indeed doing that then I would *definitely* suggest the fresh
> air option, no matter what we intend to do license-wise; see recent imports
> discussion on talk-gb ("Adding a further 250,000 roads quickly using a
> Bot").
>
>
>  After so many years, someone must surely have given at least a bit of
>> thought to how removing incompatible/un-relicensed contributions might
>> be handled?
>>
>
> Yes, certainly. As a non-LWG-member but avid reader of legal talk, and
> someone who can add two and two together, I can say the following with some
> certainty:
>
> * Data that has been created/modified only by people who agree to the
> license change will be kept unchanged. If someone should later complain
> nonetheless (e.g. "I have created and not relicensed A road and B road, and
> this pub which is at the intersection is definitely a derived work, I demand
> it must be removed") then such data might be removed.
>
> * A mechanism will be devised to determine the splitting and merging of
> ways and take that into account, i.e. if a way has been created by someone
> who doesn't agree, but later split in two by someone else, then methods will
> be found to make sure the partial way newly created by the split will not
> count as "created/modified only by people who agree".
>
> * Data that has been created/modified only by people who do not agree to
> the license change will not be kept in the new data base. If other data
> depends on this then that other data must be modified accordingly (e.g. a
> node might have to be removed from a way).
>
> * There will be some mechanism to "remind" us that something is missing. It
> is totally unclear what form this will take; it might be a separate database
> that says "whithin this rectangle, 10 streets have been removed" (without
> saying what they are and where they were so as not to infringe the copyright
> of whoever did not relicense those streets), or it might be a "note" tag on
> a route relation saying "as part of the license change, 5 members of this
> route had to be removed" or so.
>
> * There will be mechanism that show us these things *long before* the
> license change actually happens so that we have a chance to go there and
> resurvey the area, manually deleting the not-relicensed objects in that
> area. (In fact this is already starting to happen in some places in Germany,
> where the work of known "objectors" is being replaced by new data -
> premature action, I think, because people can still change their minds.)
>
> * Data that has been created/modified by some people who do agree and
> others wo don't will have to be scrutinized. Some decisions can perhaps be
> made in an automated or semi-automated process; for example, assume that
> someone has removed the "created_by" tags of 100.000 nodes in one go - this
> is certainly not an act that warrants any copyright, so if that person is
> the only one in the history of the object to have not agreed then that will
> simply be ignored. Other cases will probably be more complex, and it is very
> likely that we will want to involve the community, i.e. there will be ways
> to "flag" objects with an unclear licensing status, there will be general
> guidelines issued by OSMF, and mappers will then be asked to decide for
> themselves wheter something can be copied or not (just like mappers today
> need to decide whether a source can be used or not). There will be likely
> some form of mechanism for recording such decisions, e.g. "mapper <name>
> decided on <date> that this object can be relicensed in spite of its unclear
> licensing status for the following reason: ..."
>
> * It is likely that data from people who have explicitly said "no I don't
> relicense" will be treated differently from those who simply don't say
> anything. I could imagine - pure speculation on my part though! - a scene
> like this: The community in city X comes together and discusses prolific
> mapper Y, who hasn't been to the pub meet for the last year and hasn't made
> a decision regarding the license change. They don't know what happened to
> him but some mappers remember that he always said that he doesn't give a
> damn for intellectual property rights and he would prefer OSM to be PD. The
> mappers then decide to continue using his data in the relicensed database
> even though they don't have an explicit OK, knowing that if mapper Y should
> show up and say no they would have to remove his data later. This is a
> gamble that OSMF will certainly not make centrally but it might be possible
> locally.
>
> * In general, just because an object has once in its history been touched
> by someone who doesn't agree to the new license doesn't mean it cannot be
> kept; just the information added in that one step cannot be kept.
>
> When it comes not to individual mappers who decide against relicensing but
> to organisations who have made data available, and where we cannot secure
> their agreement to the CT, then when it is a case where data has been
> imported wholesale under one account, we *might* make an exception and say
> "ok we keep this data although this account hasn't signed the CT; we know
> that company X is ok with ODbL and if we ever change again we'll have to ask
> them". On the other hand, when it is a case where many individuals have
> added data using that source, then we will have to treat the data
> contributed by those individuals just as we would treat data contributed by
> people who don't relicense. If the individuals in question have either used
> proper source tags (PLEASE, PLEASE, everyone, do...) or they can pinpoint
> the changesets in question, then we can separate those changes (we might,
> technically, re-assign these changes to a different account that we create
> specially for that) and treat only those changes as un-relicensable; if on
> the other hand the user says "I've been using <source> for as long as I can
> think and it could be in all of my changesets" then we'll have to treat all
> contributions by that person as un-relicensable.
>
>
> Most of what I wrote here hasn't been formally said by anyone in OSMF, but
> OSMF haven't fully thought this through either, and the above is simply the
> logical course to take given all the conditions and plans that *have* been
> discussed.
>
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
>
>
>
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>

-- 
Graham Jones
Hartlepool, UK.
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