James Livingston doc...@... writes:
The reason (well, my version) for a share-alike licence is that people who use
OSM data have to release theirs, we can merge that in, and everyone benefits
from the extra data going around. ODbL help that because (I'm serious hoping)
that we could combine two ODbL-licensed data sets together into a new ODbL-
licensed data set. However I think that requiring the contributor terms would
prevent that from working properly.
That was my interpretation too. It appears to me that if some well-meaning
body released a set of data under the ODbL (which presumably we recommend as
an appropriate licence for geodata) then the OSM project would not be able to
use it. In other words, under the proposed way of using it (with these
contributor terms), the ODbL is not compatible with itself.
Personally, I feel that any licensing scheme chosen should be self-compatible;
as a thought experiment, if a twin OSM project was founded at the same time
as OSM (perhaps by FakeSteveC?) and made the same licensing choices, it should
be possible for the two projects to import each other's data. If both
organizations chose ODbL with the proposed contributor terms, neither would
be able to use or share data with the other.
Consider Unfriendly Map Corp which fulfils it's legal obligations, but
doesn't go out of their way to be nice to us, and that they combine OSM data
with their own to produce something they distribute. They release the combined
data as required by the ODbL, however unless they agree to the contributor
terms (which they don't have to), we can't take that combined data and bring it
back into OSM without giving up the ability for easy re-licensing.
The 'without giving up the ability for easy re-licensing' part is not a
disadvantage of the ODbL or the proposed contributor terms; it applies to any
licence. (Currently, data released under CC-BY-SA can be imported into OSM,
but the project doesn't have the right to relicense it without separate
permission.)
However, if the policy is that no data (ODbL or otherwise) can be imported
without agreement to contributor terms that allow broad relicensing, then in
practice data derived from the OSM data cannot be merged back in without
special permission. This does seem to defeat most of the point of share-
alike licensing. (The data set may be available, but without permission to
reincorporate it into OSM, it becomes much less useful.)
--
Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com
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