I'm commenting on what I perceive to be the spirit of the license here, and what I think the intent is, not on the license itself or how it's likely to work in a legal sense, I'm not a lawyer, nor do I claim to be. However I see a very irrational debate spiralling out of control and no one trying to put everything into succinct form.
I'm seeing a lot of excessive hand waving and so on and so forth and seeing very little in the way of fact. In terms of contributors it's just a matter if you accept to have you data under odbl or not, for most people this shouldn't be much of an issue beyond a possible conflict of ideology. >From a pragmatic point of view the only problem might be a future limitation of not being able to import cc-by-sa data, but it seems the Australian governments, and also possibly the NZ govt, seem to be leaning toward cc-by so we, the Australian OSM community, should be good on this front. Previously the Australian data was cc-by-sa but this has changed recently. People using the data on the other hand will be more limited, at least in jurisdictions where people theorise that cc-by-sa isn't currently able to limit re-use by the spirit of the license alone. This will have very little effect on most contributors and most users because most people only use tiles or apps, however for people using the data it should mean uncertainty surrounding the copyright over tiles becomes more certain. The jist of all this is some people/lawyers think copyright isn't sufficient to cover OSM rights in all jurisdictions, so they're attempting to supplement copyright laws with contractual laws, how well this will work in practise I have no idea but in theory it's just another legal tool in the toolbox to the outcome that people originally had hoped cc-by-sa would have done. So to me, the devil is in the details and I think we need to try and get our own legal advice on how it will effect us in Australia because so far they have had 5 legal opinions, but only for the UK and the US. _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
