[OSM-legal-talk] OSMHQ (Open Street Map High Quality): Viable Alternative For The National Map Corps

[Nathan Vander Wilt]

On Sep 3, 2008, at 12:25 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> All that being said, there are many people in OSM who would actually
> prefer a non-viral license (including me). Hope is more or less lost  
> to
> get the whole of OSM to adopt a BSD style license, but I hope that we
> can at least somehow flag data that comes from PD sources and/or has
> only been touched by people like me who assert that everything they
> contribute is PD. See this page for details:
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Category:Users_whose_contributions_are_in_the_public_domain
>
> You guys in the US have a good base there with the TIGER data; any US
> user who makes a modification to anything imported from TIGER and  
> who is
> *not* on the above list basically makes that data item un-PD  
> forever, so
> I hope to see many of you on that list. One could then one day create
> OSM extracts that have all the data untouched by people who want to  
> use
> the viral license.

The last I'd heard on this sort of "extraction" is that it would be  
largely infeasible. The wiki has a bit of a thread on this: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Dual_licensing_idea 
, which links to discussion about "whose node" but there has also been  
uncertainty raised regarding not just editing nodes themselves but  
what those nodes are edited in relation.

Has this been further discussed, perhaps off-list, and determined to  
be feasible after all? If not, it seems to me that "extraction" would  
be more trouble (legal and technical) than it'd be worth. Why not  
start a sister project with known pure PD sources and just edit from  
there? It might be a few years behind, but in the grand scheme it  
could be healthy to have a bit of competition in the open mapping  
arena. (And of course OSM would be free to integrate the public domain  
project's work into their reciprocally licensed database as well, so  
they could always be "winning".)

thanks,
-natevw