Hi,
On 01/18/2012 06:13 PM, ant wrote:
As far as I can see the details of the implementation of the licence
change, i.e. of what is actually going to happen on April 1st, are not
known - or at least not revealed. Correct me if I am wrong.
They are not known. A mailing list has been created (the "rebuild" list)
to discuss how exactly the database rebuild is going to happen, and in
terms of policy, LWG will have the ultimate decision. And they are
asking for out input via the "What is clean page".
That page is not, and was not intended to be, a "binding document" - it
might become one later.
I assume that LWG will certainly value your help in improving that
document.
IANAL. But I like to approach problems in a systematical manner. For
example, I recently asked myself the question, „What is a copyrightable
object in OSM?“. I think this is a fundamental question to answer if you
discuss licence topics.
It has often been said that computer geeks, of which I presume you are
one, are not well suited to perform legal analyis. The lawyer's answer to
Is a node copyrightable?
will almost certainly be "it depends". (On country, circumstances, ...)
In OSM, our current answers are:
Yes, we treat a node as copyrightable;
If yes, what's copyrightable about it?
Its position and tags, unless the tags have been created automatically.
What's copyrightable about a way?
The sequence of its nodes and its tags.
Is the list of references to nodes copyrightable separately from the
way's tags?
Every single tag and every single node reference are a treated as
copyrightable by us.
Are references to nodes atomic? (I.e. Is a single reference
copyrightable? Or is only the list as a whole?)
Atomic.
As I said, this is just our current working assumption, not something
set in stone.
All in all I think that the approach to the whole thing so far has been
too pragmatic, just like identifying edge cases and modeling something
around it. Of course, this might somehow work and the result might even
be satisfying, but to me it doesn't seem appropriate in a legally
significant matter like this.
It is possible that the approach only *seems* too pragmatic to you. I'm
not with LWG but I would assume that they would welcome you into their
weekly telephone sessions if you want.
Considering that neither the definitions of what is clean and what is
tainted nor the technical details of the implementation have yet been
finalized, it seems unreasonable for me to remap.
Thankfully, few other people think like you do. There may be edge cases,
but I guess that whichever way these edge cases are decided, a
significant portion of what is now considered tainted will always be
tainted. And that stuff should be remapped *now*.
I don't want to
discover later that I have done unnecessary work.
Your call. I'd rather re-map a few items too many than fix the holes in
my street in April.
Besides, current
remapping practice is completely based on the available inspection tools
that implement - more or less precisely - a taintedness policy that is
still in draft status. For this reason I also refuse to use the
odbl=clean tag.
The odbl=clean tag is a kludge for difficult cases anyway. If you bring
an object into a state that does not have any of the properties added by
a decliner, that is sufficient to make it clean automatically.
Now I could elaborate a lot more. But the purpose of my post actually is
to start a discussion, and I am asking you. Me too wants the licence
change to be a success. So let's go.
It's ok to discuss these things, but the approach "I won't move a finger
until I am told *exactly* what the rules are" is not helpful. The rules
might *never* be final - even when we do the rebuild according to the
then-believed-final rules, it could happen that someone later points out
an oversight, or a court decides something, forcing us to remove things
we thought we could keep or vice versa. You can only ever go up to 80%
certainty in these matters. Demanding more is not realistic.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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