OpenStreetMap's point of no return

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Back in 2008, LWN reported on the OpenStreetMap project and its plan to change the licensing of its map database. This change was controversial, to say the least, but the project as a whole appeared to be determined to press forward with it. At the beginning of 2011, the license change has not yet happened. But it has now been determined that April 1 of this year will be an important milestone date in this process. This could be interesting to watch, as the project is still not entirely sure of what it is changing to.

The new license - the Open Database License (ODBL) - is well understood. The ODBL is an attempt to stretch European-style database rights to the point where they cover the database worldwide. To that end, the ODBL is explicitly written as a contract - a crucial difference from most free licenses, which try to avoid contract law entirely. The ODBL must take this approach because the OpenStreetMap database, being primarily factual in nature, is not easily covered by copyright. A license which relied strictly upon copyright law would risk being unenforceable in much of the world.

Of course, relying on contract law has its own difficulties - contracts are only binding if everybody involved has agreed to them. Direct downloads of the database from OpenStreetMap will require a click-through agreement, but further redistribution (which is naturally allowed by the license) need not involve any such formalities. If there is ever a case in a part of the world which does not recognize database copyrights, where the defendant denies having ever agreed to the contract, the outcome could be interesting to say the least.

Be that as it may, the project Foundation voted to change over to the ODBL. But a vote does not give the OpenStreetMap Foundation the right to change the license on previously-contributed data. So, before the database as a whole can move to the ODBL, the project must (1) convince all contributors to agree to a relicensing of "their" data, or (2) remove data contributed by people who are unwilling to agree. To that end, OpenStreetMap has been trying to get contributors to agree to a contributor agreement which gives the Foundation some wide-ranging rights:

Subject to Section 3 below, You hereby grant to OSMF a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable license to do any act that is restricted by copyright over anything within the Contents, whether in the original medium or any other. These rights explicitly include commercial use, and do not exclude any field of endeavour. These rights include, without limitation, the right to sublicense the work through multiple tiers of sublicensees.

The "Section 3" mentioned above restricts the Foundation to the use of ODBL, CC-BY-SA, or "another free and open license." This agreement has been somewhat controversial within the project for a number of reasons, starting with the mechanism by which the license could be changed (again) in the future: a vote of "active contributors" would be held. Some people seem to fear that a future, dark-side Foundation could restrict contribution for a bit, then hold a rigged election to obtain the results it wants.

The contributor agreement also restricts contributors to adding data to which they, personally, hold the copyright (if any). Much of the data going into OpenStreetMap, though, comes from governmental sources and may have its own license terms applied to it. Forgoing that data seems undesirable, so some contributors understandably complained. In response, there is now a draft update to the agreement which softens that requirement. This draft has not yet been adopted, though, and there are suggestions that further changes are in the works.

Despite the lack of an updated agreement, the OpenStreetMap board recently mandated that, after March 31, only contributors who have accepted the agreement will be allowed to make changes to the database. That clears the way for the final step: the removal of all data for which permission to relicense has not been obtained. Some contributors fear that quite a bit of data could be lost at that time.

How much data is entirely unclear. There appears to be no publicly-available information on how many contributors have accepted the agreement, or how much data can be relicensed. There seems to be confusion about what will happen to data contributed by one person (who may not have accepted the agreement) which was subsequently edited by another (who did agree) - or vice versa. People within the Foundation may have a good idea of what the consequences of the license change will be, but they don't seem to be talking much; requests for information (example) have gone unanswered. The board did say, in its December 2010 meeting minutes, that:

The board discussed the issue of data loss and expects, considering what has been seen, it will not be a showstopper at the time of the final switch.

In any case, that "final switch" may still be some time in the future. The April 1 deadline ensures that new data is ODBL-compatible, but it does not, itself, force a relicensing of the database. The OpenStreetMap license change page contains a lot of information about the new license and the motivation for the change, but it contains no dates for an actual changeover. So this transition, which has dragged on for some years, could continue to drag for a while yet, especially if it looks like a lot of data could be lost. The prospect of a significantly reduced map database could give strength to the loud contingent of contributors who would rather see the project just put the data into the public domain and be done with it.

The motivations which are driving the move to the ODBL are similar to those behind the use of the GPL for code; contributors do not want to see others distribute enhanced versions of their work without giving back their changes. But trying to extend the reach of copyright to data it does not naturally cover, in a project involving many thousands of contributors, is never going to be an easy thing to do. There is no clear map showing a way out of this situation.

