[Labs-l] Licensing: CC vs. ODbL vs. ???

Sun Oct 7 19:41:38 UTC 2012

On 9/27/12 8:48 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 8:59 AM, Andrew Bogott <abogott at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>>      Currently the labs Terms of Use says " all content must be freely
>> licensable under an applicable creative commons license."  That seems to
>> exclude OSM data, which surely is not our intent.  I note that the item just
>> before that (about software licenses) uses a more expansive term, "
>> OSI-approved open source licenses."  Is there a similar umbrella term that
>> we can use for content that would include CC-like licenses without
>> restricting users to actual, literal CC licensing?
> Per our licensing policy, the definition at
> http://freedomdefined.org/Definition is our canonical equivalent of
> the OSI for free content licenses, so it would make sense to use it as
> a reference point in the same manner, e.g.
>
> "all content must be licensable under an applicable free cultural
> works license as per the [http://freedomdefined.org/Definition
> Definition of Free Cultural Works]".

This thread died without producing any action items.  I'm confident that 
there are subtle OSM-specific issues for legal to hash out, and I'm also 
confident that it will be months before Legal is able to give attention 
to same.

In the meantime, is there any objection to my changing the labs Terms of 
Use to use Erik's suggested wording?  The only downside that I see is 
that freedomdefined.org seems to be off-line :(

-A