I'd like to link to a recent interesting article on the OSM licensing change on LWN (Linux Weekly News) as I haven't seen it be mentioned anywhere yet.
http://lwn.net/Articles/422493/ It also has a 60 entry long comment section. Although much is a rehash of the the endless debates on OSMs own communication channels, there are also a set of comments by user mlinksva from Creative Commons (e.g. http://lwn.net/Articles/422754/) that seem to bring points to light that would suggest a possible, quite significant, change of attitude (or at least a perceived change) of CC towards open data licensing and OSM. I'll try and paraphrase some of the main points and hope I don't missrepresent anyone. - CC does not (no longer) think data should be PD and would be happy with copyleft on data. The statements of CC saying data should be PD were from science commons for scientific data only and was a misscommunication that it was perceived as general CC viewpoint - CC does care about data and either sees their licensing as potentially valid for data or intend to make it work for data - CC is (or will be) working on a new version 4 of their CC licenses, which will apparently make every effort to address the needs of the open data ecosystem What exactly this all means, if it is indeed a shift away from the position CC appears to have held previously, why it comes to light now and if it has any relevance to the license change process for OSM I have no idea. But perhaps we will find out more about this soon from CC as mlinksva mentioned he wanted to follow up on these points publicly. Their wiki page on version 4 ( http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Version_4 ) at least is still entirely empty. So it probably isn't anything around the corner or of any certainty yet. Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/LWN-article-on-license-change-and-Creative-Commons-tp5945925p5945925.html Sent from the Legal Talk mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
