Chris wrote: > I think this is an argument for Public Domain. > > As far as I understand the licenses, nobody is permitted to fork the > OSM data without permissions, and it is thus not truly "open": > - with CC-BY-SA, you'd have to ask every contributor the permission > to fork their data (or is only attribution needed? To whom then? The > individual contributors?)
Which is why (IMO) switching to a PD licence would require starting from (almost) scratch; while there are some contributors who would be willing to offer their work as PD, there is far too much stuff in the current database with attribution requirements. (My reason for quoting Chris above is the "is only attribution needed" question, which wouldn't as I understand it make the resulting licence public domain.) It is also (again IMO) why whatever the CT may suggest the project will have to stay with a licence which supports attribution in the future. CC-BY-SA is what we all agreed to when we started mapping with OSM; we were happy with the attribution and sharealike aspects of the project. Depending when we joined we might be aware that CC licences aren't really suitable for data (and as a result a few people are treating it in some jurisdictions as PD from what I've read previously), and that there was no other licence at the time that was suitable. So -by-sa defines the spirit of the project, and the new ODBL licence provides a basis to make that work in reality (I say this based on the assumption that the OSMF and Open Database Commons lawyers know what they are doing). (As an aside, I do think Open Database Commons should have called the licence ODC-BY-SA in case they later come up with -BY and PD variants). As far as I can see the only problem is with the contributor terms which I think should make clear the project can't really switch away from a licence that maintains any attribution requirements of source data). Ed _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
