License for *.proto files
AlekSi opened this issue · 5 comments
IANAL, but have some experience with software licenses. As far as I understand, code generated from *.proto files falls under the same license as original files. And not everyone is happy about LGPLv3+. May you change license to more permissive?
Yes, it is difficult to produce MIT license or commercial software with the proto files under this license. Can they be licensed separately as CC0 or similar, since they are fundamental to access the pbf format?
@scrosby seems to have been inactive on this repository since ~2013.
Since it has been almost 2 years since the last comment on this issue, I would just like to note that having a more permissive license for the *.proto files seems to fit more closely with the ethos of the OpenStreetMap project, at least from what I'm gathering on how the actual OSM data is licensed.
The MPL-2.0 might be a better choice for the *.proto files. Since people will wish to maintain compatibility with the official OSM PBF files, it is highly unlikely that anyone would make significant modifications to the existing structure of the PBF format, however someone might seek to make proprietary extensions that are backwards compatible with the PBF format. The MPL-2.0 would require those extensions to the format spec to be released under MPL-2.0 and made available. However, other code in a larger work is not required to be disclosed, only modifications to the MPL-2.0 licensed material, which makes it a weaker copyleft license than the GPL family.
I have nowhere near enough time as it is, but if the license is not changed, it is certainly tempting to create an all-new binary format for OSM under more favorable licensing terms, and then create tooling to convert the raw XML source into that format. At the rate these license change discussions are going, it's not even a stretch of the imagination to see such a project happening before any response occurs.
I still exist. I'm not closely associated with OSM anymore, but I have no objections to relicensing the proto files. As to what license, I'm not sure. My intention is that any extension to the file format is documented in order to preserve compatability and prevent tag-id or feature name collisions.
The Java code in this repository, I think has gone under more churn, and may actually be dead. So any relicensing of it is less important.
I would appreciate guidance from someone more closely associated with the OSM project as to an appropriate license that meets the goals and I'd be happy to relicense the *.proto files. If this is still important please get them to comment on this issue and I'd be happy to open a discussion.
I suggest you pick one of the licenses from https://opensource.org/licenses . The 2-clause or 3-clause BSD licenses and the MIT license are the shortest ones.
Thanks for that! Much clearer now.