Hi, On 01/21/11 14:09, Rufus Pollock wrote:
3. The ODbL already supports the concept of compatible licenses. If CC licenses do reach the point that they support data then this should provide a way to interope (or even migrate) to that license if a particular organization so wishes.
Who would be the person/organisation to determine what license is "compatible"? I assume such compatibility would be general, and not for a specific project?
And once a license was deemed to be "compatible" with ODbL does it then matter what the particular organisation (that issued data under ODbL) wishes? Even against the explicit wish of that organisation, users could download the data and then re-release it under the "compatible" license, right?
In OpenStreetMap, our situation currently is this: We plan to have contributors sign a set of "contributor terms" that basically say "you allow OSMF to release the database under ODbL or another free and open license that is accepted by 2/3 of the community".
Our assumption is currently that we have three distinct license change paths - in the order of difficulty:
1. ODC release a new version of ODbL, or declare another license "compatible". In that case, OSMF could simply invoke section 4.4 of ODbL and change the license to whatever ODC declares compatible without asking anyone.
2. OSMF want to change away from ODbL to a license that is not declared "compatible". They would invoke the license change clause of the Contributor terms, poll the community, and move if they get a 2/3 majority.
3. OSMF want to change away from ODbL to a license that is either not free and open, or does not pass the 2/3 in a poll. They would then have to relicense the data by asking every contributor if he's ok with "his" data being relicensed. This is what we are doing presently in our endeavour to switch to ODbL and unlikely to be repeated ever again.
The difference in 1. and 2. is that we have hitherto assumed that it must be ODC who declare "compatibility". If this were not the case, and indeed any user of ODbL could declare such "compatibility" for himself, then 2. would become irrelevant because OSMF would simply declare "compatible" any license they would like to use, not even having to poll the community...
Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ odc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/odc-discuss
