[OSM-talk] License/CT issues: Let's not punish the world's disadvantaged, pls.

Eugene Alvin Villar seav80 at gmail.com
Thu Jun 23 17:36:33 BST 2011


On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 11:49 PM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Every open source project I can think of has a fixed set of principals
> by which the code will be licensed under, and the license defines the
> sort of people that will join and help out, those requiring you to
> sign your rights away are usually typical of commercial projects, not
> open source ones.

1. Signing your rights away is not necessarily a bad thing. (The FSF
asks you to do exactly that when contributing to GNU software
projects, for good reasons, though others may rightfully disagree.)

2. Anyway, the OSM CT does not require you to sign away your rights.
You just give OSMF a very broad license grant, just like what the
Apache Software Foundation asks of its contributors.

3. Commercial projects are not necessarily bad things either.
Comparing OSMF to a commercial entity (but the comparison is not
correct, see #2 above) like it's a bad thing doesn't make sense.



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