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

[Anthony]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 12:04 AM, Russ Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:
> Tobias Knerr writes:
>  > Russ Nelson wrote:
>  > > Unless somebody has a theory under which there will be more mappers
>  > > suing more users, the only rational conclusion can be that the license
>  > > change will hurt OSM, and not help it at all.
>  >
>  > I wonder why you believe that the only way a license change can possibly
>  > help OSM is by allowing us to sue more users of our data.
>
> A license is a threat to sue plus a list of reasons why you won't
> that threat out.

Where are you getting this from?

"The verb license or grant licence means to give permission. The noun
license (American English) or licence (British English) refers to that
permission as well as to the document recording that permission."

A license is a permission, not a threat.

>  > Personally, I don't want to sue anyone.
>
> Then you should put the public domain notice into your Wiki page, so
> that everyone knows that you won't sue them under any circumstances.
> I'm not asking you to do anything that I haven't already done.

Even if you don't personally want to sue anyone, licensing under
CC-BY-SA still be better than PD in that it can help avoid you
yourself getting sued.

Personally, I don't want to sue anyone.  But I'd certainly be willing
to threaten to countersue someone who threatened to sue me.  Sort of a
mutual assured destruction strategy of lawsuit avoidance.

CC-BY-SA is the closest popular license to putting up a notice which
says "I won't sue you, as long as you don't sue me or anyone else".
That's much better IMO than a notice which says "I won't sue you no
matter what".

CC-SA (i.e. Sharealike 1.0,
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sa/1.0/) was even better in that
regard.  But unfortunately, it never caught on.

>  > However, I want to unambiguously have the right to publish an OSM
>  > based map that doesn't provide attribution for every single mapper.
>
> Then let's add a permission to the CC-By-SA which says "We won't sue if
> you only attribute the project."

I'm not sure what this whole "attribute the project" stuff is about,
as CC-BY-SA 3.0 already contains provisions allowing you to only
attribute the project.