wer-ist-roger wrote: > First of all we will lose data. We won't get everyone to agree on the > new license. No matter why. Maybe they don't approve the new > license or we just can't reach them anymore.
There's three categories to consider relating to existing data. 1. People who have made edits and can't be contacted. This is the hard one. (As said previously, I think _minor_ contributors - whose work isn't "substantial" - could be moved across automatically if they don't respond, though still given the right to withdraw at a later time, but this isn't a universally-held opinion.) 2. People who don't like ODbL and withdraw their data. _Assuming_ we can get the bugs sorted in ODbL, and we can't take that for granted yet, this percentage should be very small. I'm reminded of a participant at the SOTM licence debate (I won't identify him, he can speak up if he wants) who spoke fervently against PD - which of course isn't what's being proposed here - but later said "I think if you moved to PD, I wouldn't withdraw my data, I just wouldn't contribute any more". If that's the case for PD then surely he wouldn't withdraw from a different share-alike/attribution licence. 3. Large organisations. I believe Canada has been done with the expectation of a move anyway; the US is PD so no bother; it's immaterial to Yahoo. So the issue is largely reassuring the original owners of the European imports. IMO ODbL should always be better for them because of its "contribute back the source of improvements" clause, which of course CC-BY-SA doesn't have: so, AND (for example) are guaranteed access to all improvements based upon their work. But this is probably an evangelism job for the foundation. So all in all, if done right (and that's a big if), the amount of data we lose _should_ be very small assuming that ODbL is deemed acceptable and the bugs are ironed out. There's then a second question: how does a licence move change future contributions? Much harder to measure, but my gut feeling is that because the licences are both attribution/share-alike, the move will be largely neutral, maybe even positive. I know a bunch of people who haven't contributed significantly to OSM because of CC-BY-SA, generally either because of unclarity ("I don't have any confidence this will stand up, so I'm not contributing to something that could easily be exploited") or the old derived work issue. For myself, I'm spending every evening this week working on a detailed map of the Chesterfield Canal and the surrounding area: data which I'd put into OSM under ODbL, but which at present I do entirely standalone under Adobe Illustrator, because of CC-BY-SA. This is a regular occurrence (our magazine runs a detailed set of canal maps every month) and it frustrates me every time. But, on the other side, there will be a handful who genuinely prefer CC-BY-SA, and we'll lose them. Re: automatically moving from CC-BY-SA to ODbL via a licence upgrade: for those who don't follow legal-talk, I raised the idea there in the expectation that the nice chap from Creative Commons would respond, and sure enough, he did. However, his reply was that CC's position is that data should be licensed as public domain, so they wouldn't be interested in such a move. cheers Richard -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/License-plan-tp22245532p22304926.html Sent from the OpenStreetMap - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk