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Licence/Historic/We Are Changing The License: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 16:23, 22 November 2011
, 12 years ago→We Are Changing The License: More updates + Added section on forthcoming database rebuild
(→Mandatory Accept/Decline Began 17th April 2011: Removed section header and slightly condensed text as part of update.) |
(→We Are Changing The License: More updates + Added section on forthcoming database rebuild) |
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''OpenStreetMap creates and provides free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways.''
OpenStreetMap is asking existing contributors before 2010-05-12 to re-license their contributions under new contributor terms, ( [[License/Contributor_Terms_Summary| human readable]], [[License/Contributor_Terms| full text]] ), which allows end user licensing under the [http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/ Open Database License 1.0], "ODbL".
This page explains the basic reasons for the change and provides links to further resources with more detail.
'''Your contributions, however small, are very important to us and the contributors who build on them. Even you no longer wish to contribute, we still need your acceptance to keep them in our live database. We will soon begin the process of database re-building and hope to complete by 2011-04-01.'''
If you registered after 2010-05-12, you have already accepted the new terms and ODbL and need take no action.
'''If you have not already done so,
You can [http://openstreetmap.org/user/terms accept the new license and contributor terms here] or from your API user settings page at http://OpenStreetMap.org. You may have to log in first.
Click [http://odbl.de OpenStreetMap ODbL acceptance by region] to see an independently-made measure of acceptance.
As of 2011-
== Why do we have a license? ==
== Who is behind the change? ==
The OpenStreetMap community, mainly via legal-talk@openstreetmap.org talk list, began discussing a more appropriate license in 2005. In 2007, a decision was made to keep the current Attribution/Share-Alike license format but have it specially written for use with databases. The OpenStreetMap Foundation then cooperated with the independent [http://okfn.org/ Open Knowledge Foundation] to create the Open Database License 1.0. This was released in 2009 and a vote of Foundation members overwhelming endorsed its adoption.
Since May 2010 all new contributors have accepted terms allowing the use of the new license. To date, over 340,000 contributors are willing to allow their contributions to be licensed under ODbL.
== What license is being changed? ==
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