Graham Jones <[email protected]> wrote: > I am quite surprised there are many 'personal' contributors who would want > to refuse to have their data re-licensed - from my personal way of looking > at it the proposed new licence is so similar to the existing cc-by-sa that > it will make negligible difference.
The ODbL license is pretty similar (though some people may have strong feelings about SA no longer applying to 'produced works'). I would be hopeful that many large-scale data sources (OS included) could be persuaded to allow their data to be used under ODbL However, the proposed contributor terms change things significantly, in two ways: First you need to give full rights to your contributions to OSMF, who could then (subject to community approval) re-license them without SA or By requirements. If you are a strong believer in either of these, you may not want allow this possibility with your work. Equally if you are a company with valuable data, it's entirely reasonable that you will only provide it if there are SA and/or By provisions. Secondly, the terms would severely restrict the data sources we could make use of. In particular they would mean that despite the SA clause in ODbL, users of OSM data can prevent OSM from re-importing any added data by simply refusing to sign the contributor terms. This makes the SA provision in ODbL pretty much worthless as far as the main OSM database is concerned. Others can benefit from our work, but we could be blocked from using others' improvements. In this debate, I think it's important to distinguish between whether contributors are happy to re-license their contributions, and the separate issue of whether the license should then be changed, given (in particular) the resulting loss of data. Personally, I'd be happy to re-licensed my contributions under ODbL, but I'm not sure whether I am happy with the proposed contributor terms. (I kind of like the SA provisions.) I've yet to come to a conclusion on whether the license should be changed -- I guess that rather depends on the actual data loss we'll be faced with. I feel rather more more strongly that OSM should definitely not adopt the proposed contributor terms, for the reasons given above. Despite this I voted "For ODbL" on the doodle poll, since it specifically asked about re-licensing under ODbL. (I also hadn't appreciated the implications of the contributor terms at that point.) If OSMF only offers a straight choice between ODbL + the current contributor terms, or not re-licensing at all, I'd be in rather a quandary. -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
