On Friday 27 February 2009, Frederik Ramm wrote: > Lambertus wrote: > > If we change to the new license then do we have a tool available > > that will remind me of the bits that are going to be rolled back > > because of my contribution being dependent on someone who did not > > agree to the license? I would like to know which bits of my data > > are going to be rolled back so I can edit that area again to fix > > it. > > I think it is unfortunate that the discussion circles around this, > which is one of weak spots of the whole process. I think it is > absolutely clear that we cannot and will not accept the loss of a > large amount of present-day data.
I don't call it just a weak spot. I call it fundamental to the entire process of license changing. As long as there's no answer to it, there's really no point in going on IMHO, as no-one knows what to expect in cases where for example 5% of users opposed the change or never replied. And personally I wouldn't even accept the loss of even a tiny amount of my uploaded data. And I'm sure that's what most mappers are most interested in as well. And I would refuse to answer any question to relicense my data as well as long as there's not a single statement on what would happen with data derived from badly licensed data. And I want a very detailed answer as well, like what exact metrics would be used to calculate the amount of data without approval, and how much removed data would be acceptable. > Once we have agreed to start transition to a new license then we will > have to work very hard to get as many people on board as possible, > convince them to agree. > > We can, as Richard pointed out, surely argue our way through some > things (minor edits that are not copyrightable etc). In those cases > where we cannot reach the original mapper even though we have tried > hard (sending one email is not enough), it might even be an option to > document this process and assume the mapper is ok with relicensing > unless he turns up later and says otherwise. Ugh, and here I thought people in the FOSS world actually cared about proper use of licenses. Here's one: why not proposing to put it all under a proprietary license, and also relicense the works of those that you can't get an answer from. > But in the end it will be a whole lot of work and we will all have to > help. If, and the end of the whole process, we find that we'd have to > remove half our data to be able to continue then the relicensing has > clearly failed and must not be allowed to go on. I understand you don't really know what will happen when the vote gets out, but I'd say that now is the time to get an idea? A plain simple question somewhere "Would you like to see OSM moving towards a new license? Yes, no, don't know, under certain conditions." At least we wouldn't just be blindly guessing what could or would happen... > But I think there are many more things about the new license that > warrant a good discussion and a close look; the "what happens to my > data" question is, in my eyes, one of the less important points. The new license may be the best thing since sliced bread, but that's really not my concern. I care about whether the database will still be "clean" after a possible change (meaning, properly licensed). If that can't be worked out there will certainly be no-one making use of OSM since it'd be a legal mess. Ben _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
