On 28 September 2010 12:03, Frederik Ramm <[email protected]> wrote: > > Any future license change would then be constrained to the common > denominator of all these licenses *or* risk repeating all the data loss > whining that we're seeing now.
Yes. That's almost right. Either you permit datasets licensed under some other licence and accept that limits the relicensing you can do, or you don't permit them and retain the flexibility to relicense. Its really not my place to have any view about this. I am just trying to be helpful - which I hope is the case. Whether or not you do this, and to what extend you do, is a matter for OSMF not me. The current version of the CT's attempts to retain near maximum flexibility by having the contributor grant a very broad licence to OSMF for use of the data. That grant is not compatible with most well known "open" licenses such as CC-BY. If there is a desire that any such data be added, then the CT's should reflect that, if not then the broad grant is the better option. My specific point was that *if* you want the CT's to be permissive about importation, then it is fairer on contributors and clearer to provide an express list of compatible licenses - to avoid contributors having to make the judgment themselves. This does create work though and so is not cost-free. It may be that some specific wording of the CT's would do a similar job. In my view a list of approved licenses is easier, and it means you have more control over what is being contributed. As I have said before there are two distinct issues here (1) what contributors may contribute and (2) what OSMF may incorporate under its licence. The "problem" (if that's what you see it as) with data loss at the moment is to do with the earlier versions of the CT's. Data was contributed on condition that it be released under a specific licence. The problem you identify has a different origin: possible incompatibility between data that has been imported subject to some open licence such as CC and the licence that OSMF may use. So, a CT that permitted lots of datasets to be imported, would not necessarily prevent OSMF moving towards a more permissive licence of its own (with the caveat that imported data may have more rights associated with it), its not quite the same situation. Hence my "almost right" above. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
