Forwarded from talk because it might miss someone not on both lists
-- Forwarded Message --
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] What could we do to make this licences discussion more
inclusive?
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2010, 01:13:36
From: Roland Olbricht roland.olbri...@gmx.de
To: t...@openstreetmap.org
I've split this from the original thread before it derails the one it
was in any further, and cc'd legal-talk.
[...]
What could we (you/me/LWG) do to make this more inclusive?
Just some bullet points at first, explanation follows:
- There is no tool yet to see the impact of the relicensing to the data. But
this is the key need for those who are rather interested in the data than the
legalese. Please develop the tool first or leave sufficient time to let
develop such a tool.
- Please present a sound and complete technical solution to disentangle the
data between the relicensed and the not relicensed.
- Be prepared on a successive per-region move to the license. The communities
in different parts of the world are at different pace.
I don't think that the mappers in general are annoyed about that somebody
works on legal issues. But don't forget that one of the key features of the
project is the message: Care for the data and the applications - we promise
you won't be affected by legal trouble. Thus, I would consider the license as
a technical detail, like the change from API v0.5 to API v0.6.
Now, if the API change would have damaged an unknown amount of data at unknown
places, if would have been never done. This is because those responsible for
the API change were aware that the new API is a mean, not and end. Legal
things are less logical than technical things, thus everybody would accept
more collateral damage. But still, I would expect good faith from the LWG: it
is technical feasible to preview the impact of the license change on the data
with an appropriate tool. Some suggestions
- Have another read-only mirror that contains only the already relicensed
data. This would allow to render a map with the ODbL-avaiable. Thus, the data
loss or not-loss gets easily visible. We only need another server and a list
of all user-ids that have so far relicensed, and about 4 weeks to make
everything working.
- Don't use an extra server, but make the relicensing data available via the
main API. This needs much more brainpower, would save a server and prevents
the user-id list from being published. I would estimate this takes at least 8
weeks to develop.
I would volunteer to do option 1 if I get time until the end of the year.
Maybe somebody else could offer this faster.
Then, the algorithm unbroken chain of history of ODbL users is close to
nonsense. An easy exploit would be a bot, possible camouflaged by different
user accounts, that systematically deletes and re-inserts every object. Then,
all data would have unbroken chain of history but won't have in general.
Note that massive delete and re-create takes place from time to time, e.g.
when imports and synced with pre-existing data. I claim more time to first get
a more elaborate algorithm for the data move decision, so please remove the
fixed timings from the plan.
And, of course, things like translating messages into foreign languages and
back, explaining the licensing issues at all to mappers in foreign systems of
legislation and so on takes time. Indeed much more time than to implement a
license within the special legal system it was designed for. I don't find the
issues addressed in the implementation plan at all.
Cheers,
Roland
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