First of all I must say that I highly respect the work of everyone who
has been actively involved in the licence change, including the LWG
members, the writers of licence change inspection programs and everyone
involved in discussions.
I have been watching the process for more than two years and have ever
since been a supporter of the change.
However, especially since the switchover date has been announced and the
phase of remapping has started, I have become more and more skeptical
about the way things are going on. I want to discuss a couple of
concerns I have.
1. The black box
As far as I can see the details of the implementation of the licence
change, i.e. of what is actually going to happen on April 1st, are not
known - or at least not revealed. Correct me if I am wrong.
Particularly, the wiki page „What is clean?“[1], which has been said to
be the binding document, is in its current state not sufficient to serve
as a reference for any measures regarding the cleaning of data:
* The considerations in the section „Edge cases“ are only a random
selection of cases that have been discussed. Neither conditional
stetements like „if it can be seen not to influence the current version“
nor questions like „Can you copyright the state of something not being
there?“ (rhetorical?) are helpful. The list somewhat lacks a systematic
approach.
* The „deletion paradox“ is, as it has been pointed out on the
discussion page, no paradox at all (rather it depends on the strategy of
cleaning).
* The section „What taints data?“ repeats the above-mentioned list, but
is differently (better) structured and different in content. Statements
in this list, however, contradict, or supersede, previous statements („A
tag modified by a non-agreeing mapper is tainted“, whereas: correcting a
tagging typo is not tainted). Furthermore the list contains
instructions, which should not be the case in a mere specification of
what is clean. The clause saying that intermediate versions should be
created during remapping (a) does not belong here and (b) is
questionable, as it is based on assumptions regarding the implementation
of switchover, which has not yet been decided upon.
* There should be rationales explaining for each statement why it is so
and not different.
Basically I think that this document needs a rewrite that shall contain
unambiguous statements preceded by precise definitions. In order to get
there, however, we must of course have a discussion.
2. Getting clear about taintedness
IANAL. But I like to approach problems in a systematical manner. For
example, I recently asked myself the question, „What is a copyrightable
object in OSM?“. I think this is a fundamental question to answer if you
discuss licence topics.
Is a node copyrightable?
If yes, what's copyrightable about it?
What's copyrightable about a way?
Is the list of references to nodes copyrightable separately from the
way's tags?
Are references to nodes atomic? (I.e. Is a single reference
copyrightable? Or is only the list as a whole?)
Sorry for the rhetoric, but these questions do bother me. I believe they
have to be answered prior to discussing which kinds of modifications to
what object have what effect (-> taintedness). And when that has been
settled, we can talk about measures.
All in all I think that the approach to the whole thing so far has been
too pragmatic, just like identifying edge cases and modeling something
around it. Of course, this might somehow work and the result might even
be satisfying, but to me it doesn't seem appropriate in a legally
significant matter like this.
3. Remapping
Considering that neither the definitions of what is clean and what is
tainted nor the technical details of the implementation have yet been
finalized, it seems unreasonable for me to remap. I don't want to
discover later that I have done unnecessary work. Besides, current
remapping practice is completely based on the available inspection tools
that implement - more or less precisely - a taintedness policy that is
still in draft status. For this reason I also refuse to use the
odbl=clean tag.
Now I could elaborate a lot more. But the purpose of my post actually is
to start a discussion, and I am asking you. Me too wants the licence
change to be a success. So let's go.
Cheers
ant
[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/What_is_clean%3F
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