Hi,
the following occurred to me today, and I would be interested to
hear other people's thoughts about it. What I'm writing here is not at
all news; I just hadn't thought about it until now.
In the Contributor terms, the license that OSM data is distributed under
is mentioned in this way:
"OSMF agrees that it may only use or sub-license Your Contents ... under
the terms of one or more of the following licences: ODbL 1.0 for the
database and DbCL 1.0 for the individual contents of the database;
CC-BY-SA 2.0; or such other free and open licence (for example,
http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/) as may from time to time be chosen
by a vote of the OSMF membership and approved by at least a 2/3 majority
vote of active contributors."
It is clear that the license can be changed to a different one at any
time through the 2/3 provision.
But, even after the switch to ODbL, OSMF could go back to CC-BY-SA 2.0
at any time - and would, as far as I can see, only need a simple
majority board decision for that.
This puts OSMF in a position of quite some power.
Let us assume for a moment that there are a few big players waiting in
the wings with products ready to be launched once the license change has
come through; products that have been designed for over a year and at
considerable cost. Assume someone launches a few months after the
license change, and further assume that there is something we (as a
project) are unhappy about. Say they mix their proprietary data with OSM
data in a way where *we* think they have to release something back but
*they* point to the legal analysis they have been doing for the last two
years and say "no way, Jose, come sue us if you dare, mwhahahaha."
Could we - could OSMF - in such a situation simply say: "Know what, Mr
big guy? Either you play nice and release that data, or we'll simply go
back to CC-BY-SA 2.0 next month."
I don't assume that we would really *want* to go back but it wouldn't
exactly kill us, and depending on what is at stake (I assume it could
easily be a multi million dollar thing) we (the project) would lose much
less than those we'd be up against. We wouldn't really want to but we
*could*, and the fact that the big guy would only have to piss off the
wrong four people at OSMF to ruin his product could balance one thing or
the other in our favour.
Questions arising from this -
1. Is my reasoning correct?
2. Are we happy with OSMF board wielding this power - should we (the
OSMF membership) perhaps curtail OSMF board's powers by creating a rule
that says that any decision regarding the license under which the data
is published must be taken by the whole membership and not just the board?
3. If the CTs were changed post-license-change to omit CC-BY-SA 2.0 from
the list of available licenses, then the above scenario would become
impractical - we could then not simply go back to CC-BY-SA 2.0 without
losing data from new contributors (unless going through the 2/3 rule).
Such a change in the CTs would create more security for anyone investing
in a product based on our data by taking away the bargaining chip I have
written about. Does the power to change the CTs currently sit with the
board alone, and are we happy with that?
The power to modify the CTs carries with it the power to entrench the
current license practically forever; someone with liberty to change the
CT as they see fit could, for example, simply strike out the "future
license change possible with 2/3 of active contributors" clause and
therefore create a situation in which no future OSMF can change the
license without going through what we go through now. Of course the CTs
cannot be changed retroactively but doing so for new signups is
effective enough.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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