[OSGeo-Board] Bylaws posted

[Arnulf Christl (CCGIS)]

[...]
> "article I: talks only about software and OSI licenses, do we want to
> mention data/education as well (CC licenses etc)?"
>
> The mission statement at the beginning of article I does refer to data
> and broadly refers to the advancement of open geospatial, so I think
> that would pick up education initiatives as well ("The purposes of the
> corporation are to establish and support a diverse open source community
> to foster the development, advancement and promotion of open geospatial
> software technology and data").  I haven't given any thought to whether
> the bylaws would/should require the use of a particular license for
> data.  Certainly with software it is easy to look to the OSI.  Is there
> a similar certifying body for data/content licenses?  I'm familiar with
> CC, but do we want to state definitively in the bylaws that things must
> be licensed under CC?

Spatial data is somewhat special in this respect. I talked to Jimmy Wales 
Richard Stallman they think GNU FDL is good. Ward Cunningham is into CC,
and says its cool for spatial data too obviously.

I am not sure though. Daniel Faivre (camptocamp) is very actively
promoting a license specially designed to fit spatial data backed by an
active Canadian group, they call it PGL. I believe Jo has something up the
sleeve too and OSM is also thinking in this line. All of them are highly
interested in the OSGeo (well, dunno about OSM, they are sort of sleepy)
and it might happen that the Foundation itself will be the body creating
this special license. In the end this is one of the things that we came
together to do here. What I want to say is that we do not have to choose
from different licenses but maybe set out to create one.

Best regards,
Arnulf.

-- 
Arnulf Christl
http://www.ccgis.de