Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
Rob Myers wrote: On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 2:49 AM, Joseph Gentle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [...] And the map wins. It gets more visibillity. The promise that someone will hold you in higher esteem if you abandon your principles rarely works out. I don't think this issue is anything to do with esteem, but what principle here are you asserting we would be abandoning? The principle that if commercial companies use OSM data, they must be forced to give away their proprietary data as well? If so, that's not a principle I share. Less time and effort goes to proprietry maps. More people have a vested interest in making the mapping data accurate. There's a difference between people coming to expect that you will do work for them for free and people learning that they can contribute to the project. I find it hard to believe that commercial enterprises would be comfortable with the obvious risk of depending on an unpaid community to work for them, *especially* if they weren't contributing to it. Any commercial user of OSM will have a vested interest not only in contributing to its accuracy, but in being *seen* to contribute. [...] Community projects should not serve as random acts of kindness or distributed potlatch for corporations and local government. They should serve the community. I disagree, community projects (like everyone else) *should* practice random acts of kindness. And I believe the OSM community would be better served by being more business-friendly. If only half of the commercial users of OSM choose to contribute back, we'll still be better off for their contributions. Which we won't get if we scare them away with if you use OSM, we can force you to give away stuff you paid for. Jonathan. -- . Dr Jonathan Harley . . Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Zac Parkplatz Ltd . Office Telephone: 024 7633 1375 www.parkplatz.net . Mobile: 079 4116 0423 ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
I wasn't quite sure what exactly was wrong with Rob's comments but you summed it up nicely. On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 5:18 PM, Jonathan Harley [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The promise that someone will hold you in higher esteem if you abandon your principles rarely works out. I don't think this issue is anything to do with esteem, but what principle here are you asserting we would be abandoning? The principle ... I disagree, community projects (like everyone else) *should* practice random acts of kindness. And I believe the OSM community would be ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 6:49 PM, Peter Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: My company (Ito World Ltd) needs to be able to combine Share-Alike data from OSM with copyright data from other sources ... IMHO Other sources are usually incompatible with SA. software and produce rendered images or conclusions that we can sell (and not have to give away for free). Without an expectation that the new licence will allow this then ITO would not be participating in the project. For the PD, CC-SA and presumably the new license all allow this. avoidance of doubt I fully expect commercial users of the data to be required to make their improvements to the OSM dataset itself back to the community and we are trying to get a set of words together to ensure that these distinctions are as clear as they can be in the licence (although there will of course be grey areas on the boundaries, which is why the Use Cases are so important). Mathematicians warn us against Use Cases. With PD, no Use Cases are needed and legal fees are less. I remind councils and other people interested in the project that there is no reason why they can't pay people to work on OSM. There is some funny idea that because it is an open-source project and that the results are free that people have to do it in their spare time. This is clearly not the case with Much more true than funny. What's also true is that they don't update OSM because they don't see any benefit. This will offcourse change if OSM becomes either * the dominant online map (like wikipedia being the dominant online encyclopedia) OR * an upstream source for other maps, which isn't very likely under SA. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
Joseph Gentle schrieb: On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 12:06 PM, 80n [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I like so view OSM as a cool DIY project, not a political trick we're pulling. The problem with PD is that it permits companies to take OSM data, add their own data and benefit from result without giving anything back. Joseph's bus company could take OSM's PD data, add its own bus stops and publish the mobile app that Joseph wants. There is no incentive for them to make their bus stop data available. They gain and everyone else loses. Do you really feel comfortable about that happening? To me the main problem with copyleft licenses is that there are so many incompatible ones of them. PD has the advantage of being compatible with all of them. Philipp ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Philipp Klaus Krause [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To me the main problem with copyleft licenses is that there are so many incompatible ones of them. Here's the compatibility chart amongst creative-commons licenses: http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/blimg/cc-tw-license-compatibility-wizard.png Confusing, isn't it? And, not many licenses are actually compatible with each other. Barely any, once you take out the all licenses are compatible with themselves and everything is compatible with the PD Here's a great write-up with a guy bitching about; and concluding its better to just go PD. http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/347 PD has the advantage of being compatible with all of them. Philipp ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
Hi, Joseph Gentle wrote: Here's a great write-up with a guy bitching about; and concluding its better to just go PD. http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/347 There's also this SystemeD blog guy here with a spot-on 2.5 year old write-up: http://www.systemed.net/blog/legacy/entry060311122655.html Which ends in The long-term solution, then, must to be to create a dedicated LGPL-like geodata licence that addresses the problems above, setting out what you can and can't do in terms that are unambiguously relevant to geodata and mapping. If things don't go too bad then the ODbL might just achieve this. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00'09 E008°23'33 ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
Joseph Gentle wrote: It seems to me like everyone wins. +1 to that entire message. cheers Richard ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 2:49 AM, Joseph Gentle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You say 'everyone else is worse off' if they use a PD map. It seems like the bus company wins - they have more passengers. Privatising wealth is always a win for those who privatise it but this isn't really a reason for anyone else to cheer them on. The passengers win - they can learn about the busses more easily. They can learn just as easily if the bus company uses an Ordinance Survey map. And given the logic of the bus company saves money being good, the Ordinance Survey makes money makes this scenario even better. The environment wins (less cars on the road). And the map wins. It gets more visibillity. The promise that someone will hold you in higher esteem if you abandon your principles rarely works out. Less time and effort goes to proprietry maps. More people have a vested interest in making the mapping data accurate. There's a difference between people coming to expect that you will do work for them for free and people learning that they can contribute to the project. In time, the bus company will probably contribute some data to the map to correct mistakes and whatnot. It seems to me like everyone wins. The bus company's maps' users are not free to use the maps. Since this is about freedom, not who gets something for nothing, everyone loses. Apple was in a similar situation. They chose to use freebsd (a PD-style OS). They use it in the underlying layers of Macosx. They are one of the most vicious, control-freak companies you'll find these days. Even though they don't have to, they contribute heaps of code back to freebsd. They also ship compiled modified versions of the code that end-users don't have access to . This affects the freedom of users of the software to use it. Concentrating on the source part of open source obscures the core free part of free software. It isn't about whether people give back to OSM, it's about whether people are free to use maps. Given that apple was never going to open-source all of macosx, what would you rather they do? If we are discussing unicorns, the colour of their manes is immaterial. Is freebsd worse off because apple uses their product? No. Its much much better off. FreeBSD's *users* would be better of if they used the GPL. It's the GPL that got GNU users Apple's Objective-C compiler, and it's the GPL that got everyone WebKit. Community projects should not serve as random acts of kindness or distributed potlatch for corporations and local government. They should serve the community. - Rob. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 10:23 AM, Richard Fairhurst [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I _do_ like the fact that people in OSM are starting to figure out why Potlatch is called Potlatch. I had assumed it was a kind of stew. ;-) - Rob. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
Rob Myers wrote: Community projects should not serve as random acts of kindness or distributed potlatch for corporations and local government. They should serve the community. I _do_ like the fact that people in OSM are starting to figure out why Potlatch is called Potlatch. http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-fr/2008-October/004418.html http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-fr/2008-October/004421.html http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-fr/2008-October/004422.html Random acts of kindness ftw. cheers Richard ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:27 AM, bvh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Actually no, your bus company is just going to take PD-OSM data and is going to bring out a map with its bus routes. And its competitor is going to do the same. And no one will have the ability to take both maps and bring out one comprehensive 'public transport' map for your town containing routes from all bus companies. The consumer loses. Just to point out that under the new license (and probably the current one) they can do this anyway - and so can the fast food chains and most anyone else. They just create it as a seperate layer or as pins on the map and as a result don't have to contribute their data back. -- Brian ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
bvh wrote: If you think Apple wouldn't do that just look at webkit. I am quite convinced that had that one been pd they would just have forked it and never looked back... Actually, WebKit - which is licensed LGPL and BSD, _not_ GPL - is a good example of how liberal licences can work. See: http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/06/12/ars-at-wwdc-interview-with-lars-knoll-creator-of-khtml http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/07/23/the-unforking-of-kdes-khtml-and-webkit In brief: 1. Apple takes KHTML 2. Apple adds 8 zillion features and does only what is required by the share-alike licence (LGPL), i.e. making the source available in its rawest form 3. KHTML devs, and others, complain that the resulting code bomb cannot be easily integrated back into Konqueror. Cue outraged Slashdot articles and so on 4. Under community pressure, Apple changes its practices, and works to reintegrate (unfork) the code, _even_though_they_don't_have_to_ 5. QtWebKit now exists for KDE, KHTML is significantly better, half the world is using an open-source standards-compliant browser, etc. etc. etc. 6. We all live happily ever after, apart from maybe the IE devs ;) So share-alike itself actually ain't that helpful if the person doesn't really want to contribute back. But if you use community pressure, rather than trying to get medieval on their licensing ass, you can get a great result - whatever the licence. cheers Richard ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] PD vs SA: The eternal battle
I’m just going to pick up on one generalisation, and not really contribute that much to the actual topic, excuse me: On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 01:25:09PM +0100, Richard Fairhurst wrote: … Almost as if to reinforce it, they capitalise the F in freedom; I don’t capitalise “free software”, or “freedom” or whatever terms other so‐called supporters of free software may mangle. I have argued against capitalising the terms: The gist is that it’s a marketing gimmick, and that’s not what free software is about; and capitalised words tend to indicate they take on some different meaning, but free software is about freedom, not this “Freedom” thing, whatever that is. Simon, your friendly (uncapitalised) free software advocate. -- A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.—John Gall signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
