[odc-discuss] Fwd: [OSM-legal-talk] LWN article on license change and Creative Commons

[Rob Myers]

Do read the original thread linked to at LWN.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [OSM-legal-talk] LWN article on license change and Creative Commons
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:02:29 -0800 (PST)
From: Kai Krueger <kakrueger at gmail.com>
Reply-To: Licensing and other legal discussions. 
<legal-talk at openstreetmap.org>
To: legal-talk at openstreetmap.org


I'd like to link to a recent interesting article on the OSM licensing 
change on LWN (Linux Weekly News) as I haven't seen it be mentioned 
anywhere yet.

http://lwn.net/Articles/422493/

It also has a 60 entry long comment section. Although much is a rehash 
of the the endless debates on OSMs own communication channels,
there are also a set of comments by user mlinksva from Creative Commons
(e.g. http://lwn.net/Articles/422754/) that seem to bring points to 
light that would suggest a possible, quite significant, change of 
attitude (or at least a perceived change) of CC towards open data 
licensing and OSM.

I'll try and paraphrase some of the main points and hope I don't
missrepresent anyone.

- CC does not (no longer) think data should be PD and would be happy 
with copyleft on data. The statements of CC saying data should be PD 
were from science commons for scientific data only and was a 
misscommunication that it was perceived as general CC viewpoint

- CC does care about data and either sees their licensing as potentially
valid for data or intend to make it work for data

- CC is (or will be) working on a new version 4 of their CC licenses, 
which will apparently make every effort to address the needs of the open 
data ecosystem

What exactly this all means, if it is indeed a shift away from the 
position CC appears to have held previously, why it comes to light now 
and if it has any relevance to the license change process for OSM I have 
no idea. But perhaps we will find out more about this soon from CC as 
mlinksva mentioned he wanted to follow up on these points publicly.

Their wiki page on version 4 ( http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Version_4 )
at least is still entirely empty. So it probably isn't anything around 
the corner or of any certainty yet.

Kai
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