[okfn-discuss] summary of recent OSM relicensing discussion

[jo at frot.org]

dear all,

This is an attempt to summarize the re-licensing chat from OSM's
legal-talk mailing list in the past week.

OpenStreetmap is planning to change license from CC-BY-SA to a 
license which addresses structured data specifically. There are 
strong arguments that copyright licenses are inappropriate for 
databases. Science Commons, who recently changed their licensing 
recommendations, summarise why they are no longer advocating the use 
of CC or other copyright-based licenses for data. 
http://sciencecommons.org/resources/faq/database-protocol/#why_change

The OSMF Board suggested the "Open Data Commons" license
subject to some fixes they would like to see made to it:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Open_Data_License

Hope that this will address cleanly questions over "derived" and
"collective" work which have impeded some reuse of OSM data in past.
(In short, lawyers have been scared away by the broad ShareAlike clause.
ODL would restrict the ShareAlike clause only to the database part,
not to other kinds of works (news report, flyer etc) displaying data.)

This has provoked much re-discussion of what has always been a loud
issue for the OSM hard core; to use a ShareAlike, or a more Public Domain
style license? The terms are roughly equivalent to the GPL-or-BSD 
debate that goes on in software licensing. As Richard Fairhurst put it,
"Reconciling the two is pretty much impossible, and neither side is
going to convince the other."

The current OSM policy is SA-by-default for data contributions,
allowing users on a per-individual basis to state "PD use is fine too."
It can be the case that SA and PD contributions are tangled together 
- PD contributions subsequently edited and committed back in SA context.

Some PD-inclined contributors want a way to get a "guaranteed PD"
subset out of the database, even if that means not being able to see
significant quantities of SA edits. Some SA-inclined contributors
have stated they will remove their contributions from the database
if not "protected" by an SA clause.

However there seems to be general agreement that a CC approach for data 
is not sustainable and relicensing is unavoidable.

In the event of a license change, the OSM database maintainers will
contact all contributors (anonymous contribution is not possible) 
and get their approval of new license conditions. Then, some way 
must be found of removing edits made by users who have responded 
negatively or not at all. This may be a technically tricky process 
and in some areas involve loss of data but arguably, as it needs 
to be done, it is better done sooner than later. 

One "learning experience" for other data projects is around the 
question of rights assignment for contributions. If OSM contributors
had been obliged to assign their rights to the OSM Foundation
(in the manner the GeoTools project has been chewing over with OSGeo)
then OSMF would be able to make changes without consulting everyone
and potentially incurring casual loss of data. Assignment to a 
collective third party would thereby obviate problems with attribution.
("What happens when 1000 people have contributed a tiny bit to this tile") 
It would also provide a unified "point of contact" for questions about 
dual licensing; potential commercial use could help support a project,
and less would need to be spelled out in an initial public license.

Assignment does not look like a popular or likely move for OSM, 
but it's worth other projects considering its implications. 

I have tried to keep my opinions out of this summary and hope that
none of it constitutes misrepresentation to those people more involved,


jo

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