[okfn-discuss] summary of recent OSM relicensing discussion

Mon Feb 11 20:42:38 UTC 2008

jo at frot.org wrote:
> dear all,

First off let me say: great summary (also whoever has put together the 
OSM wiki summary has done a good job of clarifying the matter).

> 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

Indeed! To be frank I'd always assumed that OSM had adopted the CC by-sa 
simply as a stop-gap (at an early stage in the endeavours) and as a 
simple way of indicating the basic 'social contract' under which they 
wished to operate.

> 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

Even before this the SC FAQ was pretty clear that applying a plain CC 
copyright license wasn't really that suitable ...

> 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

I believe Jordan (who along with Charlotte authored that license) is 
already in conversations with them about how best to take this forward.

[snip]

> 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") 

I did think that CC licenses after 2.5 did have a 'wiki' clause allowing 
attribution to the collective work, specifically 4b):

<quote>
You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, 
reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the 
Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or (ii) 
if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or 
parties (e.g. a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for 
attribution in Licensor's copyright notice
</quote>

However this is a minor issue which will be clearly resolved in any 
updating.

> 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. 

Yes, it's an interesting question and I believe its the approach the FSF 
has tried to take in some areas. The difficulty I would imagine is that 
people may be a bit reluctant to 'assign' to some entity fearing that 
they could do a 'gracenote' (or even an 'imdb').

[snip]

~rufus