[odc-discuss] Interview with Open Street Map's Steve Coast about relicensing and ODbL

[Mike Linksvayer]

Here's a comment (seems to be in approval queue on the O'Reilly Radar post)
with my quick take. Well known stuff for most on this list, probably except
for the point Mike Dupont asked about.

Great interview. Various people have asked publicly eg
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/odc-discuss/2011-June/000381.html and
privately what "At some point down the line I personally expect the ODbL and
CC to be compatible and we will be able to cross-pollinate once more" could
mean.

The short version of a very long story is that ODbL and OSM's process of
migrating to it was prompted by CC BY-SA not adequately addressing what are
known as sui generis database rights, a copyright-like restriction on
databases that exists primarily in the EU, and something that should be
licensed along with copyright so that users have the freedoms intended to be
granted by the license and utilization of those freedoms protected by
copyleft.

The upside is that OSM got (or is about to get) a license better suited to
it. The downside is that there are now two big incompatible copyleft silos
(BY-SA and ODbL) which is bad for reuse and growth of the copyleft universe,
and contrary to general trend in both content/database (most well known is
Wikipedia migration from FDL to BY-SA) and software (various licenses
becoming GPL compatible).

In the long run I am very hopeful that we'll have the best of both worlds.
CC BY-SA 4.0 is going to address database rights, and we're talking with
Open Knowledge Foundation/Open Data Commons about re-unifying the copyleft
content/database universe. There are a number of ways that could happen, and
it'll probably take a long time. But that's mainly because these are hard
problems. Looking at the FLOSS example is both heartening (lots of progress
has been made on interoperability) and scary (it has taken a huge amount of
work and a really long time).

Further reading:
* http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/26283 post explaining nuances of
CC and databases as of early 2011
*
http://www.slideshare.net/mlinksva/towards-license-interoperability-patterns-of-sustainable-sharing-policy
http://share-psi.eu/papers/CreativeCommons.pdf my slides and position paper
for a recent panel on legal interoperability...
* ...
http://www.slideshare.net/jordanhatcher/open-data-licensing-share-psi-workshopJordan
Hatcher's (OKF/ODC) slides from same panel

There will be more forthcoming from CC and OKF/ODC as we figure things out.
I highly recommend OKF's annual conference June 30/July 1 in Berlin to
everyone (amazing program, check  it out!) and specifically
http://okcon.org/2011/programme/open-data-licensing in which Jordan Hatcher
and my CC colleague Tim Vollmer will discuss open data licensing.

Mike
(Creative Commons)

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>wrote:

> I think you can expect to hear something on this pretty soon! ;-)
>
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 6:07 AM, Mike  Dupont
> <jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > I was wondering about this : "At some point down the line I personally
> > expect the ODbL and CC to be compatible and we will be able to
> > cross-pollinate once more.", is there any more information about this
> > statement, or is it just a way of saying that the new license breaks
> > compatibility with the old?
> > thanks,
> > mike
> >
> > On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> FYI:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/openstreetmap-creative-commons-open-database-license.html
> >>
> >> --
> >> Jonathan Gray
> >>
> >> Community Coordinator
> >> The Open Knowledge Foundation
> >> http://blog.okfn.org
> >>
> >> http://twitter.com/jwyg
> >> http://identi.ca/jwyg
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> odc-discuss mailing list
> >> odc-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> >> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/odc-discuss
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > James Michael DuPont
> > Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova and Albania flossk.org
> > flossal.org
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Jonathan Gray
>
> Community Coordinator
> The Open Knowledge Foundation
> http://blog.okfn.org
>
> http://twitter.com/jwyg
> http://identi.ca/jwyg
>
> _______________________________________________
> odc-discuss mailing list
> odc-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/odc-discuss
>



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