On 14 March 2014 12:01, Martin Raifer <tyr....@gmail.com> wrote: > OSM having a share-alike licence enabled us to incorporate (and otherwise > use) all kinds of open data sets, which may be licensed PD/CC0, CC-BY, > CC-BY-SA or ODbL. (A lot of open government data in the EU is released under > CC-BY or even share-alike.) > > If OSM would switch to something more "liberal", we would cut us off from > potential source material: If we were going to "CC-BY" our database, we > couldn't use CC-BY-SA and ODbL material any more, and if we were going all > the way to "CC0", anything other than PD/CC0 would be a no-go.
As I understand it, we can't import things under CC-By-SA at the moment anyway, because the ODbL is incompatible. But there is a very valid point there, that it's not just a matter of asking contributors to agree to change the license, we'd need to review all the imported data to check whether or not the licence it was imported under is compatible with whatever license we're wanting to change to. To this end Ithink it's somewhat unfortunate that OSMF/LWG haven't taken a firmer line on the use of third-party data (not just classical "imports", but other manual uses of sources) to ensure that the sources and licences they're used under are properly documented. A change to anything more liberal than either CC-By or ODC-By (the attribution-only version of ODbL) would cut out most attribution requiring imports -- crucially, this would cause vast amounts of damage in the UK, where mappers have been using "OS OpenData" from the National Mapping Agency to enhance OSM in various ways. As for whether share-alike is a good thing, I would note that the "contribute back" argument probably hasn't helped us all that much so far -- but I think that's as much down to potential data users being slow to accept the benefits of open data. Yes, some potential users are being put off as a result, but I think in time positions may change, and data owners may well come round to accepting the benefits of open data. Also, it's not entirely clear whether allowing more lberal uses would actually benefit the project that much. (Particularly not if we didn't insist on attribution.) What "share-alike" certainly does do is to stop companies just ripping off our data and not giving anything back to the community. Philosophically and practically, I think this is a very good thing. Overall, I can see that "share-alike" may be currently holding back some potential users, but it is also helping us by preventing "crowd-serfing". Since corporate and government acceptance of opendata is currently still in its infancy, I think it would be premature to switch to a more liberal licence at this stage. We should wait to see how things develop, as the OpenData movement gains further traction, and the quality of OSM relative to other offerings increases. Robert. -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
