Hi, [email protected] wrote: > I found out recently about the license change issue, and I discover with > fear that everything looks decided. I feel I'm being rushed.
You are probably not alone. > Moreover, after having read the proposed license text and some comments on > wiki pages, I am under the impression that most of the participants in the > discussion are public domain advocates No. If that were the case then OSM would have gone PD long ago and we would all be mapping happily instead of wasting our time trying to create freedom from the barrel of a license (kudos to JohnW for this phrase). > I will not let OSM go PD. Granted, some texts claim it > will not be the case (report from SOTM), but the current text of the ODbL > raised my suspicion. Please correct if I misunderstood. You misunderstood. The basic quality of OSM is that it is a database. If it were not a database it would be utterly useless (sit down for a minute and think of what you would do with OSM data that was not arranged in a database - you are unlikely to find anything). The ODbL makes sure that whenever OSM is used or passed on as a database, then this database must also be under ODbL; it is a share-alike license. The ODbL makes an exception from share-alike where the data is transformed into something that is not a database, e.g. a printout. This may be distributed under (almost) any license. But this freedom comes at a cost for the person using it: An improved database on which the printout is based, must be shared. In this respect, ODbL can be said to be even stricter than the current CC-BY-SA, see the following example: Guy takes OSM data, adds some streets on his local machine, makes a nice printed T-Shirt with a city map on it and sells the T-Shirt. CC-BY-SA: Guy has to share the T-Shirt design (more specifically, he has to allow us to make copies of his T-Shirt). He can keep the improved database for himself. ODbL: Guy does not have to share the T-Shirt design (he has to attribute OSM but his artistic input made the design "his"), but he does have to share the improved database that he has created. From our project perspective, the ODbL outcome in this situation is much better. What good is a T-Shirt design for us? We want data. Some people come from a more ideological background and they say that they support OSM because they want a world with more "Freedom" in it, and thus it is important for them that the T-Shirt in this example is "Free" as well even though it does not help OpenStreetMap one bit to have the T-Shirt. They are of course entitled to hold this view, but OpenStreetMap is not about more Freedom in the world, OpenStreetMap is about a free world map, and this vision should guide our decision. > * Waivers : thankfully I cannot legally waive my moral rights in my > country, but I think it is unfair to require this form any person in the > world. Of course I do not require that my name is printed on all > OSM-generated maps, should they effectively contain data that I inserted in > the DB. Being collectively acknowledged as "OSM contributor" is sufficient > for me. But, I require that if someone wants to find out who are the > precise people behind the data, this should be possible. I don't think anybody is saying we should drop usernames from the data base (we need them for our project to function). If you have read the "Waivers" section as meaning we want to do that, then some clarification is perhaps needed. Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
