On 09/03/2010 10:03 AM, Simon Ward wrote:
I don’t see much compromise happening from OSMF on the contributor terms. There is a very small amount, but OSMF seems to want to stick as close to what they have, with no chance of what they consider a significant change.
If anyone can suggest a way of combining the ability to change the licence in future with increasingly not being able to do so as more and more contributors become uncontactable I'm sure a compromise can be found. ;-)
The contributor terms are now the sticking point for many people against the ODbL+DbCL+CT combination, and these are not just people against a licence change from CC by-sa, but people who are in principle happy with the licence change.
This is a change that cannot be sugar-coated. It is needed in order to ensure that if future changes become necessary they can be made.
I'm sorry to be harsh but I think that concentrating on the risks of the new CTs rather than the risks they are meant to address shows a failure of perspective. I don't believe that a stoic or pollyannaish acceptance that the licence of OSM may gradually be rendered ineffective by change outside the project is morally superior to enabling the project to rise to future challenges.
The current licencing of OSM isn't perfect, that's why things are meant to be changing. Even if the ODbL is perfect when it is applied, it may not be in future. We cannot know, and yes that cuts both ways. But we can look at other projects and see that some of the largest and most successful have relicenced. And we can see that new threats to Free Software and Free culture keep arising. Free geodata is unlikely to be any different.
And if people are worried that future changes will not be to their liking they need to get involved in the process more actively.
These contributor terms define a large part of how the future direction of OSM may be determined.
They define in large part that it *may* be determined. - Rob. _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
