[OSGeo-Edu] reminder, monthly chat tomorrow at 8am US-Central, UTC-5 hours

[P Kishor]

Thanks for your thoughts Jo.

On 8/10/06, Jo Walsh <jo at frot.org> wrote:
..
> On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 10:15:13AM -0500, P Kishor wrote:
> > 2. Developing a commons-type license for geospatial data -- are there
> > any special considerations for geospatial data that we should be aware
> > of, that we should lobby for.
>
> Within the geodata group there's been a bit of thinking about this -
> this is more of an early-days linkdump than an ongoing discussion:
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Licensing_Working_Group


The road to consensus was never not messy. In that spirit --

> The best candidate license i know of is the PGL,

for starters, I have added the PGL English version to the wiki (I hate
PDFs). See <http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/PGL_English_translation>


> From where i'm sitting, it looks very much as if *specific licenses*
> have caused an awful lot of fruitless painful discussion with regards

oh yea, this seems to be a general open source affliction. We can
strive to set knowledge free, but not without help from a legion of
lawyers.


> Also worth checking out is the approach to developing a license-first
> open geodata repository within Harlan Onsrud's group at U.Maine:
>
> http://geodatacommons.umaine.edu/

Harlan's group is the one that is organizing the info commons
conference, so that is "a" right place with some of the right folks.

>
> I would absolutely love to reach a conclusion to a geodata licensing
> discussion. But, you know despite the fact that "open source has won"
> there are still gangs of people here in Cambridge shouting at each
> other "open is not free!" / "free is not open!", and they're still
> talking about *software* ;)

You kidding me! it is everywhere. If anything, Cambridge is a mostly
likeable, sleepy little place (I am speaking from memory). "Open,"
"Free," "Libre," "Source," what a mess. I sometimes wonder if we will
succeed not because of licensing but in spite of it.

Nevertheless, would love to hear from everyone, so please join in the
babel... tonight, tomorrow morning, anytime.


-- 
Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/
Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.ies.wisc.edu/
Open Source Geospatial Foundation https://edu.osgeo.org/