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
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