On 11 June 2011 01:02, Nic Roets <nro...@gmail.com> wrote: > I would quite like to take my data and start my own PD / CC0 project. > So by simply matching my new license to the conditions set by the > OSMF, I would be voting "yes" in your "referendum".
Of course, you are free to do that. So we need to measure OSMF by standards different to those which we would expect from a national government. OSMF can't force you to pay tax and can't divest you of any data you own. Their only leverage is over how or whether you get to use resources that they are managing. And as the managers of those resources they find themselves taking an interest in licence stuff that most of us don't consider all that often. > In this "referendum", the OSMF substantially influenced the outcome by > declaring beforehand "We are changing the license". They refused to > register new users who do not vote "yes". The emails that was sent out > only listed the advantages of the license change. Sounds very sneaky the way you portray it. Sins of omission? They should probably have linked to arguments both for and against from the wiki pages outlining the plan. Come to think of it, that's exactly what they did. Odd that you didn't mention it. > I am not saying OSMF acted illegally or that the license change is a > bad thing. I am merely saying that the OSMF decided on the license > change before there was overwhelming support for it from the > community. Was The Community ever going to beat a path to the OSMF demanding a licence change? I doubt it. Does that mean that we didn't need one? It does not. Most mappers, and I include myself, are very happy that Somebody Else(tm) runs the servers, scrounges for the funds, made a slippy map work and generally gives us what we need so we can just go out and map. Should the people hosting the data not be at the core of thinking about the legal aspects? It's not like the rest of us were queuing up to have our say. > The license change was not driven by the community. It was > driven by a few individuals. How else can you explain the dismally low > voter turn out when the OSMF members voted on it ? It was driven by the few individuals who took an interest in the matter. They were not secretive about their project, indeed evangelical is the word I would use. For a long time they were met with a large round of indifference, as reflected in the poll turnout you mention. Licences, we discover, are just not sexy. "It'll all sort itself out" is a common reaction to stuff we find too abstract to care about. It's alright not to care. It's not alright to invent problems that don't exist. So anyway, we've come further in the process. It turns out that in order to find out what people think you have to steal their football and not give it back until they tell you. Democracy might be fair, but it turns out it's pretty boring too. Still, we know now that an overwhelming number of mappers are sufficiently OK with the change. Some aren't, for various reasons. And that's a shame. But those of you who aren't need to consider a few things. You need to realise that you're not the only ones here. You need to realise that there are a _lot_ of smart people contributing to OSM and most of them are OK with this. You need to understand that if you try to use "your" data as leverage you are typically jeapordising the contributions of lots of your fellow mappers. You need to remember that this change isn't the final roll of the dice. You didn't like the way this change was proposed, promoted, voted upon? Well, the new CTs define in some detail how it has to be done in the future. That's progress. You would have preferred PD/Beerware/CC-BY-stand-on-one-leg? Groovy - just find 2/3 of active mappers who want that too and it can happen without all the accusations of bad faith we've had this time around. In summary - if we were in the business of immediate perfection in OSM nothing would have gone into the map until the whole world was fully surveyed. We do incremental mapping. Learn to attain your licencing goals the same way. Dermot -- -------------------------------------- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
