Hi again, Rob and Frederik - I don't think it's too much of a leap to say that you're never going to convince each other. ;)
A note on consultation and community might be helpful. As the Foundation we are, of course, keeping track of the different strands of opinion within the community (share-alike or not, attribution or not, and so on). List discussion is helpful for this, as was SOTM, and there are many more avenues where OSMers make their feelings known. As the opengeodata posting states, "We cant change anything without you. You, not the Foundation, own the rights to your mapping." So our interest is in finding a solution that has a realistic chance of being adopted by the community. Right now, this debate is part of an informal consultation, if you like. Now that we've posted the update, people are of course going to voice their views, and those will feed into the "rough view of the OSM community". There will no doubt be more updates posted on opengeodata during which the rough view will evolve further. If the rough view (for example) appeared to coalesce around "ODCL looks good, let's do it now", we would be able to start work on a formal relicensing process. (I'd envisage, and this is very definitely only my perception rather than an as-yet adopted Foundation plan, that such relicensing could involve: discussion with the ODC authors until the licenses are in a state we consider usable; independent review by a qualified third party; and, finally, contacting every single registered OSM user to request their assent to the change.) If this rough view, however, does not settle so neatly, then the Foundation will need to decide whether it should embark on a formal consultation before the relicensing (maybe like the "poll" that some have mentioned); and the outcome of that consultation would affect the proposed relicensing. I should note that there's nothing[1] in this process that only the Foundation can do. It is something the Foundation _wants_ to do just because of its role to look after the best interests of the project. Anyone who wants to open discussions with a lawyer or stage their own poll is welcome to: I would hope that the Foundation is being open enough that no-one would feel the need to start a whole separate process, but the option is always there. cheers Richard [1] except, in the event of a relicensing, a potential mail-out to every registered OSM user. _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
