[od-discuss] Great post on difficulty of actually using "open" data

Wed Oct 30 01:06:58 UTC 2013

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com>wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 7:15 PM, Luis Villa <luis at lu.is> wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:49 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com>
> > wrote:
> >> > That's not a problem with copyleft, although writing and using too
> many
> >> > incompatible copyleft licenses is a problem.
> >>
> >> I agree, don't think the example demonstrates a problem with copyleft.
> >> It is barely pertinent. We could have same old debate about which
> >> effect would be greater: more use of copyleft would cause more of
> >> those non-open datasets to be opened, or more use of copyleft would
> >> make open datasets harder to use, less valuable. But it would be a
> >> hypothetical argument based on the example provided.
> >
> > I raised copyleft because OSM, and in the near future many CC 4
> > gov't-created datasets, are some of the largest "open" datasets around.
> And
> > I'm quite comfortable saying that ODbL, and CC4, are going to cause a
> lot of
> > headaches when people try to use them in this sort of scenario. So no,
> > copyleft isn't mentioned in this particular blog post, but it is a very
> > real/non-hypothetical concern.
>
> Real concern, hypothetical net effect.
>

The Mozilla example certainly seems to suggest that the effect is not
hypothetical (license compatibility cited repeatedly as a concern), and I'm
aware of several other non-hypothetical examples (though unfortunately
can't share details).

Luis
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