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

Sun Mar 22 07:59:26 UTC 2009

On 20 Mar 2009, at 18:26, Rufus Pollock wrote:

> 2009/3/14 Peter Miller <peter.miller at itoworld.com>:
>> 2009/3/14 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>
>
> [snip]
>
>>> 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."
>>
>> Firstly, thank you Jordan for forwarding my email to the group.
>>
>> Frederik: I think you are being a little harsh. I agree we have not  
>> got the
>> level of explanation from within the OSM project about the license  
>> as we had
>> hoped for however we are now promised a response to the Use Cases  
>> and Open
>> Issues from the OSMF lawyer so things might be improving. It will  
>> certainly
>> be interesting to compare the advice from the OSMF lawyer and the ITO
>> lawyer.
>
> That material will be exceedingly useful. I should emphasize that
> almost all the feedback we have received so far has been useful, and
> will, I believe help strengthen the license.

Thank you for the feedback.
>
>
snip

>> Any input that Jordan or others can provide on these particular  
>> issues would
>> be most appreciated.
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Open_Issues
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_Licence/Use_Cases
>
> I chatted with Jordan yesterday at length and we will be going through
> these (to the best of our abilities -- that use case is rather long!).
>

We could probably have reduced the Use Cases list down to a small  
number of 'essential' examples which cover all the issues, however the  
real message is that there are a huge number of things that people are  
want to use OSM data for and more will be added later.

In an ideal world all lawyers who understand the license would be able  
to give an instant yes/no answer to each and all lawyers would give  
the same answer! The worst case scenario is that lawyers will give  
different answers and then spend days discussing it and still not  
agree. If the proposed final ODbL draft leads to such uncertainty when  
debating these Use Cases then it is probably not a good license for OSM.

For now we need to try to produce a good license and then take a view  
on whether it works for the project.

Regards,

Peter Miller

> Rufus