Licence debates
From OpenStreetMap
If you want to get answers to unanswered questions, or you simply enjoy arguing about licences, you should subscribe to the legal-talk mailing list.
See Licence Type/Idea2 and Licence Type for a range of opinions on some of the questions relating to licences.
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Former FAQs
The following have been moved from the FAQ page as they are strongly debated by some OSM contributors.
Why use CC for geodata?
"CC-By-Sa is specialized for multimedia content. We are not aware of a common and well-known license specialized for Geodata. CC-By-Sa is very close to this. (We asked some lawyers in the past about their recommendation and they told us to best stick to a common and well-known license until a specialized version for geodata is available.)"
Will you change to some non-share alike like CC-By or BSD?
"We considered this and (some of us) rejected the license change. The advantage of a non-shared alike would be, that some contributors could use the project under less restrictive licenses. Then they may also add value directly to the project. On the other hand, other people only want to contribute under a shared-alike license. We would lose these people and their contributions."
What is the spirit of the licence?
"To make the OSM data free for everyone to use. Forever. It is not the intention of the licence to prevent the use of OSM data. However, it is the intention to ensure, that the data OSM content is free (and will remain free forever). Unfortunately, some restrictions have to be accepted to make sure of this." (The latter sentence is probably the single most contentious in OSM!)
Is there an OSM foundation?
"Yes. However it is not involved in the data license. Think of the OSM foundation as "the guys who run our servers" - anybody else could do it as well. The OSM foundation has no special role.
