To all contributors.
I'm sorry to have to urge you to not agree to the CT terms, but please
consider the points below. Please note that this is not a question of
whether ODBL is the right way to proceed, but is merely comments on the
current contributor terms which you are being asked to agree to.
1) The last sentence of clause (1) of the contributor terms requires YOU
to have EXPLICIT permission from the rights holder. Please consider if you
have this EXPLICIT permission, if you do not have it then you CAN NOT agree
to the contributor terms
2) There is a large amount of contributors who have traced imagery from
sources such as Yahoo, NearMap, or who have used data sources which requires
CC-BY-SA . If you have used any of these sources , and you have not had
express permission from the rights holder to re-licence under the current
terms of the Contributor Terms, then you CAN NOT agree to the contributor
terms
Regards
David Groom
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Collinson" <m...@ayeltd.biz>
To: "OpenStreetMap Talk" <talk@openstreetmap.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 9:18 AM
Subject: [OSM-talk] Voluntary re-licensing begins
As promised, and long awaited, the next phase of the OSM License Upgrade
has arrived. Phase 2 - Existing Contributor Voluntary Re-licensing [1]
has begun, and you may indicate your acceptance of the new Contributor
Terms for your existing OSM API account. To accept the terms visit
http://openstreetmap.org/user/terms, (you may be asked to login first),
or your user settings page.
Please note that OpenStreetMap is not changing the license on any
published data at this point. Existing contributors are being asked to
permit re-licensing of their data in the future when it makes sense to do
so.
There is no decline button, and no obligation to answer yet. Existing
Contributor Voluntary Re-licensing is for those who wish to accept the
terms and get on with mapping.
We'll be publishing which users have accepted so that we can all see the
progress in terms of users and re-licensed data.
We hope that you will accept the new Contributor Terms [2] and ODbL for
each of your user accounts if you have more than one.
** Why are we doing it like this? **
What ifs, what ifs. The key is clearly to reduce these. Those that simply
want to get on mapping and accept that we won't doing anything daft, can
sign up. Those that are worried about data loss and that the OSMF will
make a stupid decision, can wait and see. We'll show how much of the
database is potentially covered by the ODbL. We've got some help on
modelling that, and we'll aim for at least a weekly update if not daily.
We'll also make all the data available needed to calculate that, so if
you want to try a different metric or just see what is happening in your
local area, everything will be transparent.
If you support the share-alike concept, I urge you to accept the new
Contributor Terms which provides for a coherent Attribution, Share-Alike
license written especially for databases. If you are a Public Domain
license supporter, we are divided as a community on which is best and I
do urge you to give this one a good try. The Contributor Terms are
expressly written to allow us to come back in future years and see what
is best without all this fuss about procedure. And if you'd just really
like all this hoo-haa to go away and get back to mapping, well, please
say yes.
** Some supporting notes: **
() The key thing is that there are about 12,500 contributors who have
contributed over 98% of the pre-May data.
() I personally really, really want to get a coherent license in place so
that my mapping efforts are more widely used. I also really, really don't
want us as a community to shoot ourselves in the head and divide. I
pledge to continue working with *both* objectives in mind.
() The License Working Group will not recommend switching over the
license if data loss is unreasonable [3]. We will issue a formal
statement to that effect and are attempting to define better what
"unreasonable" means. A totally quantitative criteria is extremely
difficult to define ahead of actually seeing what specific problems may
arise. But I understand the concern that we are tempted to do something
wild.
() The License Working Group will ask the OSMF board to issue a similar
statement.
() We are working to create a process whereby we can model on a regular
basis how much of the OSM database is covered by ODbL and how much not.
We will make all the data needed to do that public so that anyone can
analyse using their own metrics. Work on this is active and being
discussed on the dev mailing list. You will need:
- An ordinary planet dump.
- Access to history data. A public 18GB "history dump" is available
http://planet.openstreetmap.org/full-experimental/full-planet-100801.osm.bz2.
The intent is to make this available on a regular basis with difffs. A
full re-generation takes several days.
- A list of userids of who has and has not accepted the license. Work in
progress.
() A final vote on whether to switch or not remains an option. But let us
see first if "data loss" really is an issue and what the specific
problems might be.
Regards to all,
Mike
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