[OSM-talk] We need to have a conversation about attribution
Christoph Hormann
osm at imagico.de
Fri Mar 1 11:51:54 UTC 2019
I very much agree.
In particular i have been pointing out the insulting and disrespectful
nature of second rate attributions - that is people producing other
attributions (most frequently for themselves) significantly more
prominently or accessible than for OSM.
There are of course corporate interests who try to milk OSM for all it's
worth while maximizing their short term ROI and not giving back any
more than they absolutely have to. That is natural and expected but it
is up to us to define what "they absolutely have to". If we have and
express a clear view on what we require in terms of attribution and we
are willing to actually demand this from data users this would not be
an issue. This ultimately is an economic problem and not a legal
problem.
This however leads me to what i perceive to be the real problem here.
The OSM community does not really speak with one voice on this matter
even if you exclude the corporate interests in your analysis. During
the license change discussion it became clear that there is a
significant fraction of the OSM community who would have preferred it
if OSM had adopted a CC0 or similar license without either share-alike
or a hard attribution requirement. It has been argued many times that
this would not have been a wise decision and that OSM would not be
anywhere near where it is today without a license requiring share-alike
and attribution. The fraction of the OSM community who dislike the
share-alike and attribution requirements is much smaller today than it
was right after the license change probably. There are quite a few
prominent community members who have expressed they changed their
opinion on this for example. But we also have quite a few people who
are still convinced that OSM would be better off with a more liberal
license and who would gladly change it if there was a majority for it
and who in the meantime would be in favour of interpreting the
attribution and share-alike requirements as weakly as possible.
This sub-surface schism in the OSM community, which is of course further
nutured by corporate interests, is IMO the real problem and you could
see the inproper attribution from data users as merely a symptom of
this.
What OSMF activity since the license change on this front, in particular
with the community guidelines, has tried to do is to pave over this
conflict by interpreting the ODbL as leniently as possible without this
resulting in gross inconsistencies. And in a way it is understandable
if coporate data users use this as a basis to try to take this a step
further.
The way to solve this would IMO be for the OSM community to actually in
substance accept the idea of the ODbL and the social contract among
mappers and between mappers and data users it imples as a core
component of the constitution of the project. So far i think this can
only be said for the fundamental idea of open data in general but not
for the idea of hard attribution and share-alike requirements.
--
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/
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