[odc-discuss] Fwd: ITO World legal review of ODbL license 0.9

Mon Mar 16 08:12:34 UTC 2009

Frederik,

Thanks for the email and thank you for your directness. Let me repay  
the favor by also being direct.

I find the way you phrased this email (below) abrasive and  
discouraging.  Perhaps it is a cross cultural divide or just a  
personality thing. Or maybe that was your intent. I frankly don't care  
as to _why_ it come across this way (even if the reason is  
intentional), I just want to try to move past this to get to some of  
the issues.

Just as a suggestion, the below would have been much more constructive  
and positive to say:

"I'm unclear on the scope of your professional relationship to OSM and  
I know others are, could you say more about this publicly?"

and

"I, Frederik Ramm, believe that the OSM community need X and Y for Z  
reasons from ODbL or Jordan as part of this licensing process. Would  
this be possible?"
[preferably followed with something like "How can I help?" or "I wish  
I could help beyond flagging up this issue"]

I know that you've been doing quite a bit of work both on the  
licensing issues more generally and with the German OSM community in  
particular, and I want to thank you again for that.

I'll address some of the issues raised directly in what will end up as  
a series of separate emails or posts or FAQ entries (as once I started  
writing them I realised it would take several hours to write out all I  
had to say).  As much as I'd like to drop everything and rush to  
produce these, I am focussed on the comments for the draft licence  
this week.

~Jordan

On 14 Mar 2009, at 12:38, Frederik Ramm wrote:

> Jordan,
>
> Jordan S Hatcher wrote:
>> I disagree with several of the points of the analysis, but will   
>> respond more fully point-by-point later. Also, some of the points   
>> apply to OSM's implementation specifically, which I won't address   
>> (because I don't represent them in a professional capacity).
>
> For me, as a concerned OSM project member, this "I am a lawyer but I  
> am not your lawyer" business is very disturbing.
>
> I am perfectly clear that there are professional reasons for this,  
> but let me just tell you how this looks from the ordinary OSM  
> project member's view.
>
> There is a guy who creates a license. His legal credentials are good  
> enough and his arguments convincing enough that he manages to get  
> the OSM Foundation to believe his license is good for their cause.
>
> The OSM Foundation then provide some input and help him improve the  
> license which leads to a draft. The OSM Foundation then get another  
> lawyer to review and provide more feedback, leading to an improved  
> draft.
>
> The OSM community now finds a number of problems with regard to  
> applying this license to OSM, but the lawyer who has developed the  
> license and who was somewhat instrumental in leading OSMF to believe  
> that there is indeed a way to have a working share-alike license for  
> our data (as opposed to the Science Commons view that all data  
> should be CC0 because nothing else works), now refuses to talk about  
> these issues, saying instead: "I only provide this general license;  
> it is up to you to decide whether or not this meets your needs."
>
> You may or may not know this, and arguably it is not your fault, but  
> the OSMF "license working group" sees itself as mainly an  
> "implementation working group", i.e. they see their job as driving  
> the implementation process, not so much evaluating the license and/ 
> or working on it conceptually.
>
> This means, again to the ordinary project member, that we're in a  
> strange kind of limbo. There is this license; there are these  
> problems; and what we would really really need is someone to defend  
> the license to us, someone who takes the perceived issues,  
> understands them, evaluates them against the license and then says  
> one of "yes this is a problem but if you want the license you will  
> have to live with this and you have to make up your minds", or "no  
> this is not a problem, just a misunderstanding on your part and it  
> is safe to assume that judges all over the world will not have the  
> same misunderstanding that you had", or "well this might be a  
> problem but it could be fixed by slightly changing the wording and/ 
> or accompanying the license with a second document", or whatever.
>
> There is currently nobody in OSM to take on this role, lawyer or non- 
> lawyer, paid or unpaid. And you, as the primary license author, take  
> every possible precaution not to be helpful. Even really really  
> major items like the use<->convey issue we have highlighted, which  
> for OSM means a giant difference (a difference between, I assume,  
> the license being palatable to the wider community and being  
> rejected) is only met with a shrug from your side. (I would have  
> thought that the question whether or not a Derived Database has to  
> be shared when Produced Works are built on top of it would also make  
> a difference to other potential users of the ODbL, to me this is a  
> major conceptual issue and not something that can be changed lightly.)
>
> So, again, I perfectly understand that professionally you cannot be  
> bothered to "sell" the ODbL to OSM. But currently I perceive a very  
> high risk of ODbL to be rejected by the OSM community for the very  
> reason that there is nobody willing to engage in a serious debate.
>
> It would be sad to have to say: "ODbL would have been a good choice  
> for OSM but nobody managed to explain it to them."
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> -- 
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09"  
> E008°23'33"