After ranting about the suspicious role of the OSMF concerning the relicensing debate here’s my personal point of view.
As I started to contribute data to OSM, I was like “If someone uses the data, derived data should go back to the project”. So the CC-by-SA-license just seemed to be a good solution. Many mappers still feel the same today, or want at least the data to be protected from being “stolen” or “abused” by a commercial company. Some find a “viral” license important, some the share alike and some would be pleased if it at least was an attribution only license. All valid points.
Meanwhile I think different. All of the aforementioned requirements make it very difficult to actually use the data or exchange resp. share data with other free projects. Not to mention commercial use cases, where law plays an important role. Some argue that they don’t want that commercials can make a benefit from their contributions. A valid point. But at the same moment we try to create a license which prohibits commercial use, we also prevent interesting free uses (for example, ask NOP about the legal difficulties creating his cool hiking and riding map).
In the free software world there are a couple of licenses, including the GPL. It is a very restrictive license, also called to be “viral”. Despite the fact that I have released several applications under the GPL, my personal point of view is that software released under the GPL is not free software at all. It is unfree software instead, as it neither allows the code to go to some cool other free software projects nor grant me the right to do with it what I want.
Even worse, “free” licenses might be incompatible due to their different restrictions. For the OSM data this means, for example, that we are not allowed to use data from Wikipedia in our database. This makes it difficult (or even impossible) for others to create works which merge (e.g. “mashups”) data from both projects.
A similar thing happened while I was creating icons for JOSM, our Java editor. I found cool icons on Wikimedia Commons, but if an icon was licensed as FDL I could not use it.
We currently try to establish a new license. It must apply worldwide, in several jurisdictions, in all continents and countries. The data must be imprisoned securely, and must never leave its jail. The transition will be painful. People will leave the project, data must be deleted and there will be attempts to fork the project.
Let’s assume the transition was successful and the new license is installed. What if the data leaves the jail we built through some backdoor? Can we really ensure that the fence we built will have no holes? In no country on this planet? Who will constantly control the fence? What if the data leaves the jail in a country like Absurdistan? Will it then be in the public domain anyway?
What I want to say is: Both the CC-by-SA as well as the ODbL are expensive licenses. In our attempt to avoid commercial uses, we pay for it by cool things not being developed. We drop contributors, their data and the credibility that we want to provide free geodata. And we spend huge amounts of time for discussing the new license instead of mapping the world.
You guessed it. I’m meanwhile a member of the public domain fraction. If our data was public domain, anyone could use it, for any purpose, even commercial ones. True, a commercial user would not have to give back anything. But what did we loose? And, more interesting, what did we win? It’s a tradeoff. A PD license is simple and easy to understand to everybody, not just lawyers. Other free projects just could use our data in any way they like. Even for mashups with other data with more problematic licenses. And wouldn’t it be pleasing to see a commercial navigation device with OSM data preinstalled? What do we fear?
Many contributors will object to release their data into public domain, so PD will not happen. But I doubt we do us a favour. If we put our personal animosities aside for a moment and tried to only consider the facts, there are (almost) no arguments against releasing our data into the public domain.
