On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 04:47:25PM +0200, Frederik Ramm wrote: > Apart from this being pretty much useless to anybody
You don’t know what use something is until someone does something
unexpected with it, and then you find that it is useful after all.
A lot of free software was created to scratch a personal itch, the
authors probably thought they might be useless to anyone else, but
released as free software on the off‐chance someone would find a use for
it. In some cases people do find a use, they modify it so it can
scratch their itch too, and everyone benefits.
> (By the way, *for how long* would I have to make a database available
> after using it in a one-off gig like the T-shirt?)
It should probably be defined in the licence. For software, the GPL
(v3) says:
6.b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product
(including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written
offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you
offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to
give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the
Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is
covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily
used for software interchange, for a price no more than your
reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source,
or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server
at no charge.
As long as someone gives me a t-shirt based on free works, I’d like to
be able to get them too.
> improvement shared. If sets up his local copy of Potlach (the tool of
> choice for such operations!) and randomly moves 1.000 Central London
> nodes while urinating on a pile of Ordnance Survey maps and becomes a
> famous perforance artist then we don't *really* require him sharing his
> "improvement" even though it surely elevated OSM from the banal into the
> artistic Olymp with him.
…and if someone else would like to use those randomly moved nodes for
their own act?
The idea of making things free is so people can build on other peoples’
works and allow others to build on that in turn. It’s not up to us to
say how people should be able to do that, but we can try to enable all
sorts variations that would never have crossed our minds as much as
possible.
> But if we say you have to basically share everything you do to the
> database (as I understand the license to require now) then we make it
> unneccessarily hard for people to work with the data.
Back to the software version again: If you make modifications to
software licensed under the GPL there is nothing making it difficult for
you to work with it (freedom 0 is about having the freedom to use the
software). When you release it to another party, and only then, you are
obliged to propagate the same freedoms you received to them.
I’ve asked this elsewhere on the list but I haven’t seen anybody answer
it: This is not difficult for software, why should it be, or is it, any
different for data?
> We must do everything we can to avoid making things more difficult for
> people than they are now (they are difficult enough already).
I see it as difficult to work with at the moment because CC-by-sa
doesn’t apply meaningfully to data, not because of the share‐alike. A
new licence that does apply meaningfully to data and keeps the
share‐alike condition will make things easier for people than they are
now.
Simon
--
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that works.—John Gall
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