1. Open Definition, http://opendefinition.org/ http://opendefinition.org/ 2. OSM already has a sharealike licence, albeit more akin to LGPL than GPL 3. No, yo

1. Open Definition, http://opendefinition.org/ http://opendefinition.org/ 2. OSM already has a sharealike licence, albeit more akin to LGPL than GPL 3. No, you misunderstand entirely. The Contributor Terms and the current choice of licence (the Open Database Licence) are separate. Even if OSM changes licence, the same Contributor Terms still apply, and those continue to mandate a free and open licence. There is no way to move to a non-open licence without breaking the terms under which every mapper has agreed to contribute their data. (Even if you did: why? The OSM Foundation is intentionally light - it's a million miles away from the Wikimedia Foundation. Its assets are the domain name and trademark, a very small amount of hardware, and one part-time staff member. You could fork OSM trivially if the Foundation decided to "close the dataset", i.e. hosted a non-open dataset on openstreetmap.org.)