At 04:23 PM 12/05/2010, Jochen Topf wrote: >This contains: "You hereby grant to OSMF a worldwide, royalty-free, >non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable license to do any act that is restricted >by copyright over anything within the Contents" > >Why is such as blanket license necessary? > >This puts the OSMF in a unique position to undermine the whole project. If >somebody subverts the OSMF, he can do whatever he wants with the data. I don't >think its a good idea to expose the OSMF to even the possibility of that >happening. The whole point of the license is to give *nobody* a way to make >the once open data not open anymore. With the IMDB and the CDDB we have two >examples where this exact thing went bad. Not somebody coming from the outside >taking the data and making it proprietary, but somebody from the inside.
Hi Jochen, CDDB was certainly in our minds when we designed this and I understand the concern. In summary, it is not a blanket license as it is a package with the next clause 3. We think we have the Foundation completely locked in and that has been a subject of discussion with legal counsel. Clause three prevents the Foundation from distributing OpenStreetMap data under anything except a free and open license. Even if the Foundation was hijacked and clause 3 removed, it could not apply retroactively, so the Foundation would be clearly in breach of the Terms for all existing contributors as of that date. Here are the main reasons for it being as it is: 1) We are following the basic model proposed by the Open Data Commons. A database can have a license covering the whole database and then separate licensing conditions on extract individual items of content (the "Contents" referred to). For example, a database of photos may be freely distributable, but use of individual photos may have a far more restrictive license. In our case, it makes more sense to place the use conditions (Share Alike, Attribution) on the database itself. Then, end users effectively only have to look at the ODbL rather than worrying that then may be able to use some but not all the data. 2) We wanted to have a defined practical and democratic process for changing the license in the future; this does not exist at the moment. The future may be two years or one hundred. It allows *active contributors* (not the Foundation) freedom to change to another "free and open" license in the future (clause 3) without second guessing what they might need. We've left the definition of "free and open" deliberately open for future mappers to interpret. ... the worst case I can see is that in, say, ten-twenty years, the number of active mappers drops dramatically and allows manipulation. However, I still cannot see "free and open" being stretched to the point where a commercial hijack becomes feasible. The last two sections on http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/We_Are_Changing_The_License also touch on the issue of why the Foundation is involved and trust. Mike _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
