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

[Russ Nelson]

Mike  Dupont writes:
 > how can you take a cc-by-sa document edit it and publish it under pd?
 > can I just make derived works in any license i want?

Well, that's part of the problem here. How do we determine what is
someone's work, and what is a derived work?  If I take a way that
someone has entered (poorly), and I move each and every node, and fix
the speling on the name of the way, whose creative work is it?  (one
could easily argue that the other person was the one being "creative"
whereas my work is merely a fact about the world, but I'm not going to
make that argument here).

We don't really know the answer to that, which makes this whole
"license changing screw the community, we know better" exercize a piss
in a pot.

Seriously, if I was Google (and I'm thinking of a specific person --
no, not Ed), I would look at the licensing confusion and disarray in
the Open Street Map community, and say "God damn, what a bunch of
idiots. They have some good ideas, like VGI, Mapping Parties(tm), JOSM
(nice to have a dedicated OSM editor, but what an unusable piece of
crap it is) and a GeoBus(tm). Let's use those ideas, make our own map,
and put the goddamn thing out in the public domain once it's good
enough to kill off Navteq and TeleAtlas rather than have them just
steal it. Oh, and we'll kill OSM too, which is too bad, but they had
their chance."

-- 
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