Hi,
it occurs to me that we have two things mixed up here.
We have a PD community with renewed energy who initially talked about
starting some kind of OSM/PD that would share data with OSM wherever
possible, accepting that OSM proper won't go PD.
They were then told in rather unpolite terms to go away because "OSM is
not going to go PD ever". (Which was't even what they suggested.)
This led to them now questioning why OSM should not go PD, and what
would be required to do that.
Which painfully interferes with the re-licensing process that had just
been revived after a half-year lull (with the majority of the "new" PD
people not even having followed how this whole process came about and
what was done in the last two years).
My suggestion is this:
1. Let us - the "powers that be" in the project - accept that there are
people who want (some of) OSM in the public domain, and let us accept
that, where contributors are ok with this, this is a valid concern. Let
us not stigmatize this concern and tell them to find their own place to
run their own project; let us create an OSM mailing list where, in the
future, we investigate the possibility to give OSM contributors the
option to dual-license their data, so that - to the extent permissible
by licensing - there might be a subset of OSM that is actually PD
because the contributors wanted it. Whether or not this turns out to
work is a completely different question - I am not saying we should
allocate any resources or make any promises, just set up the mailing
list and accept that OSM/PD is a topic worth discussing INSIDE our project.
2. In return for this "inclusive" act, let us - those that would rather
like to see OSM go PD as a whole - hold back this discussion for at
least as long as the re-licensing process is finished and OSM is under
ODbl/FIL. Let us accept that the ODbL/FIL is a workable compromise and,
at any rate, something better than the CC-BY-SA we have now. Let us
concentrate forces on how we can make OSM an inclusive platform that,
while generally being share-alike licensed, also opens avenues for
contributors to dedicate things to be PD and users to extract such data
if they want, even if that means that the PD stock will always just be a
lesser-quality subset of the whole of OSM.
To end this with a Peter Miller-esque phrase: Does that make sense?
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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