Frederik, I'm still lurking on this list - rather than demagogue the issue, I'm mainly watching the comments and trying to learn from them. It's actually very interesting to watch a community struggle with the issues in real time.
In the absence of evidence - this is all very new - there's a ton of ideology-based assumptions that we all are making in this debate, both in the pro-share alike faction and here at Science Commons in favor of the PD. As I've noted here and elsewhere, my ideology is that *data integration is essential* and that leads me to my conclusions. Thus, I think that the Share Alike choice on data is a closed choice in disguise, and that PD is the natural state of data on the network. Time will provide us with the evidence we need to make data-driven decisions. In the interim there has been a fair amount of movement in other areas of geospatial that have reached out to SC to do PD work, so I'm focusing most of my energy in this space on that area. Spending my time preaching doesn't seem the best investment when I can instead work to help communities that already want to build PD-based systems... jtw _______________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Message: 5 Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 16:35:30 +0200 From: Frederik Ramm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] License Change Status? To: "Licensing and other legal discussions." <legal-talk@openstreetmap.org> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; delsp=yes; format=flowed Hi, > > being new to the legals-list, I tried to search on the wiki I found > > this > > link: > > http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262 Which is half a year old. In the mean time we have witnessed one guy from Science Commons defending their recommendation of "CC0", and SteveC going characteristically ballistic in response, and a little bit of discussion about whether and how the "contractual" aspect of the new license might work - but not a lot more than that. > > Would a more clear explanation on the alternatives and maybe an > > informal > > "poll" (through a webtool) among contributors help find feelings of > > the > > contributors and allow the Foundation to take a "wise" decision > > that is > > best community-backed (or see if further details need explanation > > to the > > community)? I am not sure. Regarding the "PD vs Share-Alike" discussion, both sides have been known to wildly exaggerate risks to a point where it could be called demagogy. If you create a poll from the statements issued in these discussions, the poll would look like this: Would you prefer OSM to a. become endlessly bogged down in legal hassles and die a slow death or b. be sucked empty by evil Google & Co. and die a slow death? Adding the question of license change to this "poll" might look like: or would you prefer to c. delete half our data and re-license the rest under a license that's not used by anybody else on the web? ... all of which is not exactly what we want people to think ;-) and this is probably the core of why we're not seeing the discussion we ought to have. Too much danger of hurting people; a typical situation encountered in politics where the politician knows that global warming is a problem but at the same time anything he can do is unpopular and will provoke lots of angry people shouting him down. 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