Hi, On 12/10/10 03:09, Simon Ward wrote:
We are expected to give OSMF broad rights and trust them to do what’s good, yet if a contributor should attempt to assert their rights it is deemed unjust, unfair to the community, or whatever other daemonising you can think of. The balance is wrong, and it needs to be more towards the people than any central body, including OSMF.
This is not how I see it. I think the balance needs to be towards the project as a whole, not towards the individual and his whims. The OSMF doesn't need to come into this at all - if you want to formulate a CT that lets 2/3 of the project force OSMF's hand in any possible license change, I'd have no problem with that.
You speak of "asserting rights" and make it sound as if this was the natural thing to do. Instead, what we are discussing here is the opposite; we are discussing the granting of rights, without which the project would not be possible. We are currently using one way for the individual to grant rights to the community (the CC-BY-SA license), and we are transitioning to another way for the individual to grant rights to the community (the CT with license change option).
I think it is obvious that the more you "assert" and the less you "grant", the less you trust the community. I've been called a communist for this but I believe that in our project, it is necessary to drop the selfish thought of your contribution being your personal property that you need to "assert rights over" because you cannot trust the community to do the right thing with it.
If you are not prepared to *give* your data to OSM - if you'd rather only *lend* your data so you can sit and watch how the project develops and withdraw your contribution should they take what you view to be a wrong step in the future - then maybe you aren't ready for a large, interconnected, collaborative project like this. You can close your account on flickr at any time and take down your photos with it without hurting anyone in that community - but except for the most exotic cases you cannot remove your contribution from OSM without causing damage that is larger than your contribution. Maybe, then, the community should view your contribution with the same suspicion that you seem to view the community: "Let's rather not take his data, who knows what he's up to."
Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
