Hi, a few days ago Richard Weait asked for suggestions patches from people who critized CT v. 1.0. I therefore decided to join this mailing list and post a suggestion myself.
I am perfectly fine with the ODbL but am unhappy with the CT, because I am not allowed to opt-out of license changes that I object to. My suggestion is the following change to section 3: 3. OSMF agrees to use or sub-license Your Contents as part of a database and only under the terms of one or more of the following licences: ODbL, version 1.0 or later, for the database and DbCL, version 1.0 or later, for the individual contents of the database; CC-BY-SA, version 2.0 or later; or such other licence as may be approved by the process defined in section 3.1 and section 3.2. 3.1. A free and open license can be chosen by a vote of the OSMF membership and approved by at least a 2/3 majority vote of active contributors. An "active contributor" is defined as: a contributor natural person (whether using a single or multiple accounts) who that has edited the Project in any 3 calendar months from the last 12 months (i.e. there is a demonstrated interest over time); and has maintained a valid email address in their registration profile and responds within 3 weeks. 3.2. OSMF agrees to inform You of all newly approved licenses if You maintain a valid email address in their registration profile. OSMF agrees not to relicense Your Content to the newly approved licence if You object to the license approval within 6 weeks. Apart from the opt-out clause, I also added "or later" to make it easier to do license changes that are already possible anyway. (Both CC-BY-SA and ODbL contain clauses that allow upgrading to a later version.) I will offer a thought experiment to explain why I believe the option to object is important. Consider the extremely unlikely event that the OSFM suddenly turns evil and wants to sell the OpenStreetMap database content to a proprietary competitor. It could then lock out nearly all contributors from the system, and make sure that only a few people can continue contributing. Those few people could then very easily vote with a 2/3 majority to relicence the database to the Public Domain license, which is free and open. It could also decide not to publicly release this PD version but to only sell it to the competitor. I know that this thought experiment is absurd. I generally trust the OSFM to do the right thing. But I would be far more comfortable with being able to opt-out of any license change that I consider problematic. Thanks for the hard work that the LWG and all other CT revision contributors are doing! The process of updating the CT and of responding to criticism within the community is far more important to me than the actual result of this update. Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
