On May 6, 2008, at 9:44 AM, Nathan Vander Wilt wrote: > [blah, blah, blah]
I hope that I did make my concerns clear without offending anyone too greatly. Regardless, it would probably be more helpful to say what I hope could be done to address my concerns, instead of just more-or- less complaining. I really would like to see a license as simple as the following: For data users - 0. Open Street Map collects and creates public domain map data. 1. Attribution of Open Street Map is expected. We make it easy. 2. Contributing back or freely sharing modifications is strongly encouraged. For map editors - 1. Only add essentially uncopyrighted map data. 2. You are welcome join the list of contributors. This is pretty much how the Public Domain Data Licence with Community Norms works, right? (See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Open_Data_License#Criticism ) Set up community norms to say "BY-SA" and it seems like a perfect fit for the data and (hopefully) most contributors' wishes. I see a lot of benefits to this, certainly over the current license, but even over the proposed set of new licenses: - Easy for contributors large and small to understand. - Much easier to check existing datasets for compatibility. - Doesn't change much for data users in the open source community. - Enables commercial use by small companies who want to do the right thing, but can't just ignore grey areas that leave them or their customers liable. - It wouldn't change much as far as abuse by large corporations, as I'm sure their lawyers are earning more than our lawyers anyway. It actually seems like a clearer license with more indemnity could encourage a bigger company that is still somewhat concerned with it's PR credibility to use the data as intended. Wouldn't the resulting publicity do much more for OSM than a viral license? Right now the current and proposed licenses only seems to hurt small businesses, who can afford neither proprietary data nor the liabilities of the remaining grey areas. (I hope that precluding any sort of commercial use of the data is not the intent of most contributors.) If the data is in the public domain, sure some bad guys might abuse it, but please don't disregard the benefit that companies willing to follow the spirit of the community norms could bring to the project. thanks, -natevw _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
