Hi, > I've posted an update on the OpenStreetMap Foundation's current > activity on the licence issue to the Opengeodata blog:
Thanks. The license issue is important, it is, however, not "one of the most debated aspects of the project" - I believe many little tagging things range before it ;-) That's the OSM pragmatism coming through (if we can't fix it, ignore it) but of course in this case this won't make the issue go away. SO it is good to see some people working on this. I'm a bit sad about the fact that the Foundation seems to be over-eager to avoid conflict of any sort. Yes, we're in this together, and yes, we want to be a feel-good community and have it warm and cosy and all; but we all remember the question about who was in favour of going PD being asked at last year's SOTM, and we all remember that there was an overwhelming majority in favour with only a few voices against. Now I'm all for respecting the desires of minorities if practically possible, but if a poll of all contributors should paint a similar picture, then I'd say let us go PD (or let's follow the CC "open access data protocol") sooner rather than later. It is hard to accept for me that such a small number of people should have the say about the project we all built together. And if we should go PD, then they're in a better position: They can fork the project under any license they desire. I feel that the Foundation should at least poll the contributors, outlining the situation and asking whether people would prefer to use the basically-PD open access stuff or the ODC duo of licenses. The result of this poll should not be binding for the Foundation but given them an idea of what people want. Of course the wording of such a poll would have to be carefully crafted and I suspect that this is what the Foundation didn't want to get into, but I feel that's running away of sorts. It should be possible to describe the alternatives objectively. My personal, slightly non-objective view, is PD - pros - easy to implement, legally trivial, does not require policing, compatible (on the usage side) with any other data cons - will lead to loss of data by people who do not want to support PD, and may have compatibility issues on the import side (e.g. cannot import data that mandates attribution) CC - pros - no loss of data, copyleft "spirit" remains intact, world becomes better place, legal requirement to give stuff back to OSM cons - needs to be policed and enforced, incompatible (on the usage side) with other free and non-free licenses, there will always be uses that 99% of the community thinks legitimate but are not covered by license It's all a question of retain control over our work, or just relinquish control and donate our work to whoever wants it, including the evil guys. And I say this again, if I saw that a majority of OSM contributers thinks that the copyleft aspect is important, then I'd not have this discussion. It is just that it seems to me that there are very few people who hold up the CC banner. And most of these, after some thinking, silently retract their banner when I ask them how they'd combine OSM data with a GNU FDL source and what the result should be licensed under... Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00.09' E008°23.33' _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk