Hi, John Smith wrote:
I'm guessing those that are more pragmatic and would like to be not redoing 20% or more of the work already mapped so they fork and move on with their lives under a different project
Which is perfectly legal, and personally I would actually encourage that. OSMF will probably neither have the resources nor any interest in keeping a parallel CC-BY-SA world, with planet dumps and tiles and all, available after the license change. They will make a full history dump available all right but that's not so easy to handle for everyone. So if some people were to properly plan and set up a CC-BY-SA database after OSMF made the switch, all the better for everyone. I would certainly use it from time to time.
There are some issues involved in doing that properly, e.g. one might want to devise a mechanism by which people could re-claim their username in the forked CC-BY-SA database (which is unlikely to have access to the OSM user database), and things like that. These issues should be properly planned and openly discussed by those interested in keeping a CC-BY-SA version of OSM alive.
Some people seem to think that such a fork is evil; some seem to even use it as a threat ("and if I don't get what I want, then... then... then... I'll FORK THE PROJECT!!!!"). But I don't view it that way. One is always best at doing what one likes, and continuing in an environment which one doesn't like is not only bad for oneself but also bad for that environment. So if one is unhappy with how things go in OSM, and feels it cannot be changed, forking and making it better is really the positive, constructive choice - where one can use one's energy to build something one likes rather than to ruin something one doesn't.
I'd only hope that everyone who wants to do a CC-BY-SA fork would work together so that we don't end up with 10 of them.
Also, there's no reason to wait with the fork until some later date in the license change process. Indeed, some people are even today holding back on edits which are based on sources that might not be ODbL compatible - because they fear it would all be for nothing. If they'd be given the chance to contribute their stuff to a purely CC-BY-SA fork then perhaps they would.
Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
