After reading some of the licensing posts, and some of the OSM wiki information on licensing, it really seems that OSM is treading into some new legal territory. I think OSM really has two (2) paths it could follow in this area. It could (1) attempt to avoid the issues altogehter, by throwing everything into the public domain, for example. Or, it could (2) attempt to be a leader in this relatively new area of law, and accept some of the risks invlolved in that leadership.
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that the OSM community decided to go with the second route. Here are some things that might help: [1] Produce a document explaining the communities intent for allowed uses of the data. This wouldn't be a legal document like a license or a contract, but a document that clearly stated what goals we are striving to acheive through our different licensing decisions. We know what we want (I think), we just don't have a legal document that matches this exactly. A document that clearly explains our goals for allowed uses of OSM data will provide everyone with the logic behind current and future license/contract/public domain decisions. It will be our "data licensing mission statement". The law could (and will) change, this licensing mission statement would not. [2] Have a standard tag for OSM features that indicated the license the data was released produced under. You could easily sort trough OSM features based on license type if we had this sort of tag. [3] Have contributors to OSM click-trough an agreement stating that OSM has the ability to relicense the OSM data as they see fit, for the good of the community and in compliance with the data licensing mission statement described in item [1] above. This might prevent having to throw stuff away. These are just some suggestions. Perhaps they have been discussed in the past already. The Sunburned Surveyor _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
