Frederik Ramm wrote: > Hi, > > I am unhappy about the much-iterated claim that we would lose a lot > of data if we were to go PD (or CC0, or a similar non-virulent > license).
Frederik, I applaud your effort to write this first section in an NPOV way, and I think you mostly succeed, but I think there's one part where you overstate the case. > 2c. Contributors who have currently licensed their contributions under > CC-BY-SA have the option to withhold re-licensing because they are > unhappy with the new license. We have no information about the > criteria these people will use for their decision. There may be people > who dislike PD and will not re-license under PD (but would accept > ODC), and there may be others who dislike elements of the ODC license > and not re-license under that (but accept PD). I don't think it's true to say that we have no criteria on what these people will use for their decision. Leaving aside the question of enforceability, the current licence is, in general terms, a licence requiring attribution and sharing-alike of data. Everyone who has contributed data to the project has, at least, indicated their willingness to contribute data under a licence which has these sort of general terms. The ODC is designed also (again, in general terms) to be a license requiring attribution and share-alike. So it is not unreasonable for someone to suggest that contributors are more likely to accept the ODC than a switch to PD. We can also look to the history of free software project relicensings to get some idea of how people might react to various changes. I agree that the set of contributors is not exactly the same, but I assert that the data is still useful. Being the person who ran the major Mozilla relicensing, I have some knowledge in this area. I know of no projects which have changed from share-alike to PD/BSD or equivalent. (If anyone knows of some, please say so.) However, I know of several projects which have added or strengthened share-alike provisions - Wine and Mozilla being only two. At least in the Mozilla case, we chose a more-complex-than-ideal tri-licensing scheme precisely because many contributors considered the copyleft idea to be non-negotiable. Switching to PD/BSD was considered a complete non-starter. Of the 400+ contributors asked, only four contributors objected initially to the addition of the GPL, and the two major contributors of those four later thankfully changed their minds. Gerv _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
