[OSM-talk] Community important, license unimportant

[Russ Nelson]

Kate, I appreciate your dislike of all the worry about the license,
and I agree with it. My biggest take-away from being on the Open
Source Initiative board of directors for 13 years was that: community
matters; licenses don't. So here we have a situation where 20% of the
people think it's really important to change the license; 20% think
it's really important to NOT change the license; and the majority
doesn't care.

As usual, the majority is right, and the minority (both 20%'s!) are
wrong. The question that we need to worry about is not the legal terms
of the license, but instead: will changing the license hurt the
community more than leaving it alone. I'm not sure anybody but me is
worrying about that.

Note that I've written two paragraphs without saying "data" once?
That's because the data separated from the community is like a corpse
separated from its life. It gets stinky pretty quickly. Both of the
20%ers worry too much about the data. The important part is the
mapping, not the data!

So I highly encourage everybody EVERYBODY to shut up, pay less
attention to the licensing, and map.

-- 
--my blog is at    http://blog.russnelson.com
Crynwr supports open source software
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