[Geojson] Outstanding Issues?

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sun, Oct 21, 2007 at 11:33:21PM -0400, Raj Singh wrote:
> 1. Is the big deal with CC that you don't have to read a long  
> statement because the icon(s) will tell you what you can do, and re- 
> using a "standard" license means there can be nothing hidden in it?

Yes. Well known licenses are vasly preferred when they are possible. The
CC licenses are well understood. Additionally, although the OGC license
may mean to say what you just said, the wording is different enough from
the CC attribution license that it does cause concern -- Allan's most
recent post points out, for example, that the wording seems to place the
onus for enforcing the copyright license on the provider of the content.
I can't really be blamed if someone violates the license of a document
I'm providing in accordance with the license -- and with CC licenses,
that's relatively clear, whereas the wording of the OGC license makes it
unclear.

> 2. Would adoption of a standard CC license increase the number of  
> readers of OGC documents?

I think that there are two things that would need to happen to make me
more comfortable linking to an OGC document as a reference
implementation from webpages I work on: 
 * Moving the 'click-through' license to live inside of the PDF document,
   even as the first page. Make the license part of the document, not
   something you have to read *before* you get to the document. I don't
   think that it's legally any less effective, and it significantly
   changes the workflow to be more friendly to the end user.

 * Changing to the CC Attribution license, which is well understood, so
   that users of the standard understand what they're allowed to do and
   not allowed to do without having a lawyer (since CC essentially boils
   their lawyerese down to English for you).

A third, which I think is important, but in a different vein is:

 * Publishing specs such that they are sharable and addressable on the
   web. (This means 'not-PDF'.) See:
     http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/text.html#GlyphOrientation
      "10.7.3 Glyph orientation within a text run - Text - SVG 1.1"

   If this were the case, then rather than linking to the overall SF
   spec, GeoJSON could link to the specific section we're referring to
   with geometry implementations. Additionally, it would have solved the
   problem of me not knowing what the heck people keep talking about
   when they quote random chunks of numbers out of OGC documents at me
   :)

Although I think I'm at the point where I'm willing to just let the
argument go as far as linking to it from the GeoJSON spec, I think that
if OGC really wants to address the web, it needs to at least start
behaving more web-like. (It's possible that OGC has no intention of
addressing the web. I think that would be a mistake, but it's possible. 
In that case, these comments are well-intentioned, but irrelevant.)

Since GeoJSON is specifically designed with the web in mind, it's rather
painful to have to link to a PDF document protected by a click through
license in order to tell people what the expectation is about how
geometries are supposed to behave. The three things above would help
change that pain. from my point of view. 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta