Richard Fairhurst <richard <at> systemed.net> writes: >We don't actually have a clean dataset. Nowhere near.
>The reason we haven't been sued is exactly the same. Intent and good faith. You are right. So what is the way of dealing with a relicensing that preserves the intent of the contributors and is done in good faith? I would argue that only a conservative approach is good enough - removing all the 'no' contributions and things that depend on them. A complex set of rules and hand-waving to see what we can get away with isn't really acting in good faith and doesn't really respect the intent of people who uploaded data expecting it to have a CC-BY-SA licence. Again I would suggest the 'Google Maps Test' for any proposed scheme. Suppose back in 2005 somebody made substantial changes that were blatantly copied from Google Maps. They have lain undetected until now and others have made improvements to that area of the map. But now the copying has been detected, how much data must be deleted? Another way to consider it is that one OSM contributor, having done most but not all of the work in a particular region, wants to make a proprietary, copyrighted map of the region based on OSM data. How much of the data contributed by other OSM mappers does he need to remove? What about if another contributor originally added a feature and then he improved it? And so on. It is very tempting to give ourselves special indulgences when considering all this. Surely it won't matter if we just do X; we can mix together different licences for a transition period; it would be unkind and inconvenient to throw away large chunks of data just because the person who happened to map the region first couldn't be contacted. After all, we're all conscientious people acting in good faith and we want to do the right thing - that's the main thing, surely? Acting in good faith means taking the most cautious approach, seeing things from the other side, and not treating the OSM project any differently from another entity which wants to take the contributed work and strip off CC-BY-SA. -- Ed Avis <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
