[OSM-legal-talk] hands on commercial applications

[Mika Semann]

Hi !

I know this topic has been discussed before and probably in detail - anyway I am searching for a precise answer which I find difficult to extract from the FAQ's and the mailing archive.

At the company I am working with we would like to develop a low-budget aeronautical navigation system which shall include a moving map system as one out of many other features. Wihin the moving map we need to display different data especially aeronautical data like airspaces, airports, navaids etc. and a basic "background" map as well. We probably have to use commercial aeronautical data due to different reasons (availability, reliability etc.). This data shall be displayed on top of a basic "background" map showing transportation network, waterbodys, populated places etc. I have found public domain data for this purpose but I am a bit unhappy about the VMAP Level 0 street network data I planned to use which seems to be quite old and imprecise. This is why I would like to use the openstreetmap data for the roads. Thereby we would need only the 3 topmost classes. We won't do any routing on this data; it will be used only for visually enhancing the background map. I understand this data as being independent from the other layer(s). We won't use Openstreetmap data to collect or enhance other data we will only visualize the data together. I have to point out that it is not the moving map display let alone the street map layer we are trying to make money with but our hardware.

So the question is: are we allowed to use parts of the Openstreetmap data in our system ???

What we of course can't do is to put this commercial aeronautical data we will buy (or licence) under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license as it is not our own data.

If it is not allowed to use the data as described above would it be different if we give our customers the possibility to upload Openstreetmap data on our device themselves ? I have just done so with my personal Garmin handheld GPS receiver as it is described here:  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Mkgmap. As this is an official openstreetmap website I assume that it is legal from the Openstreetmap liscence point of view.