Dear All, Here is an announcement from Steve Coast regarding another step in the long, slow process of improving the OpenStreetMap data license.
I've paraphrased [] one portion of his email where he originally had broken links. The license change is a good thing. I'm looking forward to it being finished though, as it seems to have been going on for ever. If you have not been previously aware of the license change, my summary is this. 1) ccbysa is a great license for creative works and a great concept for data 2) but Creative Commons told us that ccbysa is not intended for data after we started using it 3) Open Knowledge Foundation created the ODbL to be both for data, and identical to ccbysa in concept 4) volunteers from OSM have been going through the steps to transition to a new license for some time now Some folks don't like some aspects of the proposed license. They are participating in the license process and will be free to not adopt the new license. Some folks are tired of what seems like periodic, tedious discussion of arcane legal gobbledygook. They are free to learn as much or little about the issues and participate in the degree they choose. If you've not heard of the license change before, I recommend this highly simplified process. It should take less than five minutes: 1) have a look at the ccbysa summary http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ 2) have a look at the ODbL summary http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/ 3) decide that the licenses are close enough for you, 4) when the license change process asks you to accept the ODbL in a few weeks or months, agree to do so. 5) and keep mapping. And if you can't just accept that the licenses are close enough for you, based on the summaries, follow the links below for more details and discussion. But that will extend beyond the five minute process above. ;-) Best regards, Richard ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: SteveC <st...@asklater.com> Date: Wed, May 12, 2010 at 10:47 AM Subject: [OSM-talk] New users have to sign up to the ODbL To: p...@opengeodata.posterous.com, openstreetmap Mailing List <t...@openstreetmap.org>, osmf-t...@openstreetmap.org After several thousand man years of effort by the License Working Group and a bit of help by TomH, the new contributor terms and license are up and to be agreed to by new users. [Signing up for OSM now presents you with a contributor agreement, http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Contributor_Terms] where essentially you are signing up to the existing CCBYSA plus the ODbL (Open Database License). This is one step along the long path to moving to the ODbL. For all your fun ODbL needs, check out the wiki page: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ODbL Why is this step being taken? Basically, it bounds the problem of moving to a license which actually protects and clarifies the uses of OSMs data. Otherwise, the number of people who have to move grows every day. From now on, it is a bounded problem of only the users before today. Several further steps will need to be taken to actually move to the ODbL. I'd like to thank all those involved in the ODbL and the LWG for all their hard work over the last two or so years in making this small step happen. And, remember, if you have any concerns or objections then they've likely already to have been discussed at the above wiki page(s), or you're welcome to be involved with the change process by joining the legal mailing list and/or joining the LWG calls. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list Talk-ca@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca