Re: [Maps-l] License change of OpenStreetMap data and its effects on wikipedia

Hello everyone, as many of you will already know, OpenStreetMap has been planning to change its license from CC-BY-SA 2.0 to OdBL 1.0 for a long time now (several years). It appears that the date of the actual change is now approaching fast and that the intended plan[3] suggests that the change will begin on the 27th of March and be complete by the 1st of April. As, unlike Wikipedia, with its change to CC-BY-SA, OSM so far has not had a clause in the license to switch to a different license, it had to independently and separately ask all of its contributors to relicense their data to the new license. In a project with more than 200.000 contributors reaching all of them and getting them to agree to a new license is an (near) impossible task. Therefore despite OSM(F)'s best effort to reach as many mappers as possible, obviously not all could be reached and convinced to agree. As OSMF does not hold the copyright (the individual mappers do), it can only re-license the content for which it has permission and has to delete all other data. Worldwide currently 2% - 3% of data are affected[1], but for some regions or countries 10% or more of data have to be deleted. The question for Wikipedia (in the sense of the maps rendered on the toolserver and embedded in a number of language wikipedia's) now is how to handle the license transition? My suggestion is to freeze the toolserver's openstreetmap database on the 27th and stop all data updates for now. After the dust settles on the license change and the impact of the deleted data become more apparent, one can reevaluate the situation and decide at what point the missing updates are worth more than the deleted data. At that point a fresh import of the OSM database would be necessary after which the updates can resume. My guess would be that it would take a few weeks or perhaps month for the most visible damage to the data to be fixed, but it is very hard to predict this so far. An overview of the current situation can be seen on cleanmap [2], which shows either what the map will look like after the license change, or on badmap which data needs to be removed or modified before the license change. After the re-import, it will also require a slight adaptation of the attribution to reflect the license change to OdBL. The tiles (which are embedded in Wikipedia) I believe can still be published under CC-BY-SA (it is only the data that is under OdBL, not the produced work) and I don't think it will directly impact (or prevent) any of the current other usage of OpenStreetMap data in Wikipedia. However, I don't know if the Wikimedia legal council has or wants to say anything about it and / or give its OK for continued inclusion? What do others think? How should the OSM license change and the resulting removal of data from its database be handled in Wikipedia? Do people agree with the above suggestion? Does it have any other consequences? Further thoughts? Kai [1] http://odbl.poole.ch/ [2] http://cleanmap.poole.ch/ [3] http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Rebuild_Plan [4] http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/About_The_License_Change _______________________________________________ Maps-l mailing list Maps-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/maps-l