Hi,
Simon Biber wrote:
I and many others need a firm commitment to ensure contributions continue to be
protected by attribution and share-alike in the future.
-1
(I mean, you may "need" that but you shouldn't get it. As an aside I
also want to point out that the use of "continue to be protected" in
your sentence does not fit with current wisdom about CC-BY-SA and our data.)
I am against trying to force our will on "OSM in 10 years". OSM in ten
years will have a larger community and a larger data volume by orders of
magnitude. I don't think it is right to force their hand in any way over
and above the necessary minimum just because a few of us think so.
What exactly the necessary minimum is, is subject to discussion; I could
imagine that the necessary minimum perhaps includes that we fix an
attribution requirement, but a share-alike requirement would certainly
be going too far.
It is bad enough if the share-alike minority force their will on the
rest of the project now; we must not allow them to force their will on
everybody who is in OSM in 10 years' time.
Oops. That wasn't exactly calming the waters, was it. But it needs to be
said.
There is also a very practical reason against fixing anything, and
*specifically* a share-alike requirement, in the CT, and that is that in
order to make *clear* what you want you will have to write half a
license into the CT.
Imagine that we put the phrase "a free and open license with
attribution and share-alike" into the CT. Imagine further that, at some
point in the future, a change to ODbL 1.1 is debated, and that ODbL 1.1
only had minor changes over ODbL 1.0.
Then someone comes along and says: "Sorry guys, the CT say that the new
license must be share-alike. But ODbL is not properly share-alike, see,
it allows non-share-alike produced works, and it allows non-share-alike
extracts if they are not substantial!"
Bummer. At that time, we'll have one hell of a discussion about what
exactly qualifies as a share-alike license and whether ODbL 1.1 is
covered by the CT.
To avoid that, you would have to write into the CT exactly what you mean
by share-alike. By doing so, the CT would become much longer and more
complex, and drastically reduce the choice of license in the future even
within the pool of share-alike licenses. Inevitably, we would write what
we *today* think is right into the CT - but the whole point of allowing
future OSM communities to choose their license is that they may adapt.
Trying to force their hand - when their contributions will vastly
outnumber ours, and they will be 10 or hundred times more than we are
now, would be overbearing. I don't think it would be morally right. The
amount of data we have collected and the amount of time we have invested
will, in 10 years' time, be minuscle compared to what the project is
then, and using that contribution to justify wanting to have a say in
OSM for all time is just greedy.
I am aware that this is a moral statement and that it will be required
to do slightly less than what is morally right, for practical reasons.
And that's ok; we're all pragmatic.
Bye
Frederik
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