* Alex Barth <a...@mapbox.com> [2014-03-13 10:26 -0400]: > http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/lxbarth/diary/21221
This is really similar to the discussions that periodically happen in the open source software community over whether share-alike licenses like the GPL or open-use licenses like the 3-clause BSD license are better. I usually end up on the side of share-alike for reasons best summed up by a friend of mine who once said, "The GPL restricts your freedom to be evil. The BSD license doesn't." I think that if your goal is to have as many people as possible using your data, you're best off choosing open-use or public domain licensing. (Richard Weait and I chose to go with CC0 and PDDL for the data in the shield rendering so as to allow for as much variance of reuse as possible. Similarly, it makes sense for US federal government data, because their mandate is to be as useful to US citizens as possible.) If, however, you want to foster a community around a larger scale project, I think share-alike is a better path to take. If OSM switched to public domain licensing today, there would almost certainly be more people using and benefiting from today's OSM data. Google in particular would probably make OSM data part of its data; they already merge numerous public domain datasets into their proprietary dataset. That would make Google the better choice for a lot of people than plain OSM data, and you can even edit Google's data through their Map Maker program. From there, I suspect that Map Maker would attract more people that might otherwise have ended up contributing to OSM, which would hurt community growth and benefit Google at the expense of all the other OSM data consumers. In my opinion, the single biggest thing that makes OSM valuable is the community of people contributing to it, and the license on the data needs to reinforce that community, not allow proprietary data uses to splinter it. -- ...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/ PGP: 026A27F2 print: D200 5BDB FC4B B24A 9248 9F7A 4322 2D22 026A 27F2 --- -- lately my mania has been mega-lo-mein-ia, which is to say i believe the plate of noodles is larger than i am. -- elysse ---- --- -- _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
