On 27.07.2012 23:52, Frederik Ramm wrote: > On Fri, 27 Jul 2012 22:33:59 +0200 > andrzej zaborowski <balr...@gmail.com> wrote: >> That's not the point, you still can't mix the future OSM data with >> CC-By-SA data in the same database and publish that. This ability to >> "mix" is one of the main features of free licensing and if you're >> using a license incompatible with every other project, your data >> becomes useless for a lot of uses. > > Err... share-alike licenses rarely allow any mixing. CC-BY-SA cannot be > mixed with CC-BY-SA-NC; neither of them can be mixed with GFDL or > GPL... so nothing new here: Any share-alike provision reduces > usefulness.
The relevant "ability to mix" here is the ability to mix content, rather than licenses. Share-alike licenses do allow that just fine as long as (almost) everyone uses the same one. That's the only reason why e.g. the GPL tends to work in practice. Mixing of share-alike content stops working when people decide to use incompatible licenses for whatever reason. > ODbL, with its lack of share-alike for produced works, is already one > of the more liberal share-alike licenses. Because of the problems with mixing content under different share-alike licenses, the popularity of a license is often more important in practice than small differences in liberalness. > What you're proposing (or seconding) here is quite difficult; it would > mean having a second licensing model inside OSM and having to track > exactly what is derived from what in order to find out which license > can be applied. It is much more than just a flag on a user page. OSMF has been granted the right to publish the full database under the CC BY-SA in addition to ODbL, and I still think we should just continue to make use of that right for now. > It is not impossible that, come CC-BY-SA 4, OSM might decide to use > that. I hope that CC-BY-SA 4 will indeed turn out to be a viable license for OSM. To me that's just another reason to keep CC BY-SA available until we can decide if we like where CC is going with their licenses. Not dropping CC-BY-SA would send the signal that we still consider CC's licenses a realistic option for the future of OSM, and that we would like to stay compatible with the open content mainstream if possible. > But dual-licensing, > or worse, dual-licensing of a subset of the database, seems difficult. Dual-licensing a subset of the database is indeed not practical. Dual-licensing the whole database, though, isn't that difficult at all. It just requires a bit of goodwill from the OSMF and the willingness to keep that door open. Tobias _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
