On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 06:14:29PM +0000, SteveC wrote: > If you have anything further to add then please raise it on this list > before midnight on Friday 22nd.
I've refrained from adding commentary as, not having been an active contributor for while i don't want to assume any role in a "community process". This is no vote, but a consultation for the benefit of the OSMF Board. It has been an amazing discussion. But I can't resist chucking 2 cents in if there is a midnight deadline on airing opinions. The essay "Non-commercial isn't the problem, ShareAlike is" helped convince me that rights-based licenses for data block reuse, and as more licenses flourish, the problem worsens: http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/347 or just this image: http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/blimg/cc-tw-license-compatibility-wizard.png "How can a community so focused on freedom", he asks, "approve of any restrictions?" And so we get into deep philosophical questions, does evil exist, does intent matter, what does "the" mean, etc. With respect, i don't expect to find the answers on osm-talk-legal. I did find a lot in common with what the Archbishop of Canterbury was saying recently about Sharia law, a discussion which he claimed "in fact opens up a very wide range of current issues, and requires some general thinking about the character of law... we need a fair amount of 'deconstruction' of crude oppositions... It is always easy to take refuge in some form of positivism." To choose one rights-based license is like choosing one rights-based legal framework, to the deliberate disclusion of potentially incompatible others. (And those who do not agree, have the right to pick up their data and go back where they came from). Decisions get made on the basis of what appears to us to be the "nature of law", a set of accreted and perhaps unexamined assumptions about property, protection, enforcement and agreement, created over many centuries by and for a few "ruling" wealth-holders. So following a path of law leads us to more law. We Need law to protect ourselves against people wielding bigger law. Talking the language of law constrains what we think and mutates our concerns. I have no anti-ODL beef, it probably presents a best set of solutions to what are currently identified as legal problems. CC-BY-SA has always caused community problems with ShareAlike, now thrown into sharp relief by the maturing discussion over the last few years and the number of new projects in a similar situation. Progress may be slower with a PD-BY project, but this will bypass this gripping over-concern with the letter of the law. But the legal framework will change, the context of what other projects are doing will change, and these decisions will need to be made again. When that happens, this whole discussion and the disparately motivated PD arguments will still be there, unchanged. As someone pointed out several hundred emails ago, 95% of the OSM contributing community just does not care about license terms. Of the 5% talking here fractionally few, perhaps none in the end, will insist on revoking their contributions. Whether "relicensing" goes in a PD+BY or ODL direction the technical issues in reverting selective edits to an "approved" state will remain the same. The choice probably is not going to make that much difference. So pick the option that makes access and reuse easiest. love, jo _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk