[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > dear all, First off let me say: great summary (also whoever has put together the OSM wiki summary has done a good job of clarifying the matter).
> This is an attempt to summarize the re-licensing chat from OSM's > legal-talk mailing list in the past week. > > OpenStreetmap is planning to change license from CC-BY-SA to a > license which addresses structured data specifically. There are > strong arguments that copyright licenses are inappropriate for > databases. Science Commons, who recently changed their licensing Indeed! To be frank I'd always assumed that OSM had adopted the CC by-sa simply as a stop-gap (at an early stage in the endeavours) and as a simple way of indicating the basic 'social contract' under which they wished to operate. > recommendations, summarise why they are no longer advocating the use > of CC or other copyright-based licenses for data. > http://sciencecommons.org/resources/faq/database-protocol/#why_change Even before this the SC FAQ was pretty clear that applying a plain CC copyright license wasn't really that suitable ... > The OSMF Board suggested the "Open Data Commons" license > subject to some fixes they would like to see made to it: > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Open_Data_License I believe Jordan (who along with Charlotte authored that license) is already in conversations with them about how best to take this forward. [snip] > One "learning experience" for other data projects is around the > question of rights assignment for contributions. If OSM contributors > had been obliged to assign their rights to the OSM Foundation > (in the manner the GeoTools project has been chewing over with OSGeo) > then OSMF would be able to make changes without consulting everyone > and potentially incurring casual loss of data. Assignment to a > collective third party would thereby obviate problems with attribution. > ("What happens when 1000 people have contributed a tiny bit to this tile") I did think that CC licenses after 2.5 did have a 'wiki' clause allowing attribution to the collective work, specifically 4b): <quote> You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or (ii) if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g. a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution in Licensor's copyright notice </quote> However this is a minor issue which will be clearly resolved in any updating. > It would also provide a unified "point of contact" for questions about > dual licensing; potential commercial use could help support a project, > and less would need to be spelled out in an initial public license. > > Assignment does not look like a popular or likely move for OSM, > but it's worth other projects considering its implications. Yes, it's an interesting question and I believe its the approach the FSF has tried to take in some areas. The difficulty I would imagine is that people may be a bit reluctant to 'assign' to some entity fearing that they could do a 'gracenote' (or even an 'imdb'). [snip] ~rufus _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
