[Gllug] License debates

[Cillian de Roiste]

Hi,

Forgive my naive response, I know little about geography or law, but
since you asked:

I guess the interesting aspect of geographical information compared to
creative works is that the end results are all meant to represent the
same physical thing.
One element of this will be the raw data collected, another will be
the software used to assemble this and process it in various ways and
another will be the structure, format and design of the
representations (xml formats, visual icons etc.). Perhaps this needs
to be fleshed out a bit to cover contributors' expectations of the
project.

I'm guessing this may indeed require a new licence to cover it. I
don't think a GPL licence on the raw data would restrict someone from
processing it and copyrighting their own representation of it. A CC-SA
licence on processed content would also surely mean that a mash-up
which made use of it would be required to also be CC-SA licenced which
may restrict people from being able to mix the content with content
provided under other licences (which may or may not be desirable). All
licence options will have repercussions so fleshing that out may help
an informed vote. I'd say you really need proper legal advice on this
from organisations like Creative Commons, FSF etc.

Once you've fleshed out the complications you'll probably need to
present some options to the community and have a vote. I like the way
CC present the options clearly. It will need to be very clear what
each option will enable and prevent and the reasons for each. You'll
then possibly need to re-licence the content you've already got and
accept that you're going to lose some of it and possibly have the
project forked. Re-licencing is going to be painful but if there are
concerns that it doesn't match the community's intentions then the
sooner you deal with it the better. The value of changing the licence
vs the cost of doing it will probably be an important factor.

I realise I've wandered from the question, but that has already been
answered really: make a clear decision as early as possible and stick
with it, re-licensing is painful so if people want to use another
licence they can start another project. I don't think there is a good
way to make exceptions like some of the community seem to want e.g.
allow a TV channel to use the maps without adhering to the licence as
this will be good for the project/publicity. But this is the strength
of the licence. I wonder if a dual licensing model would work, MySQL
seems to use that successfully. I think this means that the user
decides which licence they want to use with different
conditions/restrictions under each.

Anyways, that's all very much a laypersons opinion. It's a great
project so I hope this legal stuff gets cleared up without too much
pain so you can get back to what you really want to be doing.

Best of luck,
Cillian

P.S. I'm sure you're aware of this already but I was concerned reading
through some of the list that members felt that laboriously tracing
copyright protected maps would make it ok to use that data. I believe
that many of the publicly available maps contain small insignificant
deliberate errors so that it can be proved that their data was copied.
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