On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 9:21 PM, Simon Biber <simonbi...@yahoo.com.au> wrote: > On Sun, 22 August, 2010 11:55:27 PM, Peteris Krisjanis <pec...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> As I'm interested in keeping my data within OSM and find a common ground with >>rest of you, I'm delighted to see that requests to specify 'free and open >>license' in CT section 3 has been taken into account[1]. Huge thanks and sorry >>for any emotional storm it have caused. >> >> [1] http://www.abalakov.com/?p=56 > > Now this has been changed again, seemingly to dilute the given assurance that > the Contributor Terms will be amended to make clear that this refers to an > attribution and share-alike license. > > My reading of the changes means it now only says that some explanation will be > made as to whether this refers to an attribution and/or share-alike license.
That's certainly one possibility. We do have more to do, so that the existing terms can be clearer to more people. That will be coming soon as well. But you asked about a specific part of term 3. Term 3 could be changed to specify attribution, virality or both. I'd like to see it stay with "free and open" because I think that "free and open" is best for the future OSM community. Here's why. We can do the license change now because it is the right thing to do, or we can do the license change now and make future license changes simpler for future OpenSteetMap communities. If we leave out a relicensing provision entirely, the future OSM community will have to do this all over again. All of it. Not just casting about for the new license and convincing the majority of the community that the new license is right, but also the figuring out what to do about the data touched by those who disagree. Eliminating that last point seems like a worthy improvement to make to the process. Future license changes will still be hard. There will still be disagreement, ably argued, over NewFreeDbL v2.3 vs. SuperOpenEverything v1.0[1] There will still need to be a 2/3 majority to accept that license. There is bound to be some loss of future mappers after any future license change as well. A license change is not something Free Software communities do for fun. Nor does OSM. I'm surprised that some individuals in the community are pushing back so hard on "free and open" not being the right approach. Some would prefer insisting on attribution as a minimum, others would prefer that we cast both attribution and share alike in stone. I think that both attribution-only and attribution, share alike licenses qualify as "free and open" as are PD-like, or disclaimer-only licenses and many other variations. We know them when we see them. Some of us choose between free and open licenses in the Free Software world depending on context. We choose LGPL for one project and AfferoGPL for another. But we don't choose the license before we know the context. And that is what surprises me about the push-back against term 3. I'm surprised that some in the community believe that they know the context facing the future community better than the future community will know it when they see it. I'm disappointed that some fingers are pointed at "OSMF" and "LWG" as not worthy of trusting with a future license change. Partly that is disappointing because "OSMF" and "LWG" could be any one of you. And I'm surprised again because future "OSMF" or "LWG" will be just like you, or in fact actually be some of you. Or your children. Or your grandchildren. And some of you don't trust your future-selves on the "OSMF" and / or "LWG". So that's a surprise to me. It's even more of a surprise that some of you don't trust a 2/3 majority of your future-selves to make the right decision in a future license choice. But there will be future license changes. Even if they are minor version changes to ODbL v1.1 there will be changes. GPL is on version 3[2]. CC-By is on version 3[3]. If the best of the Free Software licenses have to change over time, and the best of the Free Culture licenses have to change over time, it seems reasonable that the best Open Data license will have to change over time too. We know that future licenses will change because the world is changing. The world is changing in part because OpenStreetMap is changing the world of open geo data. Isn't that right, Ordnance Survey? Best regards, Richard [1] Those are made-up license names. As far as I know they don't exist. [2] Version 1 of GPL was published in 1989 [3] Version 1 of CC-By was published in 2001 _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
