[OSM-talk] odbl

[Joseph Reeves]

> No, just that your more likely to get an answer about the legal side of
> things in legal-talk.

But this is the problem; the "legal side of things" is the central
issue to OpenStreetMap at the moment. You can't simply try and
sideline a difficult issue by describing it as "legal".
*Open*StreetMap is defined by its license, but there are plenty of
people who want to change the license, and therefore the core of the
project, without explaining in layman's terms what this means.

I signed up to contribute to a map with a specific license; changing
the license down the line isn't a legal matter, it's a core user
issue. This is something that many in the licensing discussions have
failed to address, probably because it's difficult and it's easier to
say "the legal mailing list is over there".

I've received emails from OSM contributors asking why I haven't
accepted the new license terms; I always reply saying that I would
consider it if it could be explained in a manner that didn't end in
trolling on the mailing lists. So far nobody has managed to do that.

In fairness, I don't want to get spammed on the talk list with
trolling (Anthony?) remarks about the license change, but saying that
people can't ask questions about it *at all* is just a lazy attempt to
try and ignore the defining feature of OSM. There's a balance that
needs to be struck, but people should understand that legal issues are
core to OSM.

If you want to contribute to a project and not ask questions about the
legal issues concerning data you produce, you might as well sign up
for Google Map Maker; I thought that OSM had this licensing issue at
the heart of what we did, but I could be wrong.

Cheers, Joseph




On 5 March 2011 23:29, Robert Naylor <robert at pobice.co.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, 05 Mar 2011 23:10:38 -0000, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> So basically you are saying that it is not possible to explain it in
>> layman's terms.  Thank you for your input.
>
> No, just that your more likely to get an answer about the legal side of
> things in legal-talk.
>
> --
> Robert
>
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