[OSM-dev] Licence of the Mapnik style?

Mike Dupont jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com
Tue Apr 10 22:49:20 BST 2012


On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Cartinus <cartinus at xs4all.nl> wrote:

> That would already be achieved with GPL. You don't need AGPL for that.


Well AGPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html covers public propagation
and network interaction, the GPL does not. Under the gpl you would be able
to create modified styles on your own server and not publish them.

"""To "propagate" a work means to do anything with it that, without
permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement
under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or
modifying a private copy. ''''

The issue here of style sheets is that they are not conveyed to the users
via the tiles. The stylesheets are not contained directly in the tiles only
indirectly, and the user does not interact with them directly only
indirectly.

I think that you can execute a private copy of a style without incurring
any copyright issues at all, except for constants contained in those styles
that are copied into the resulting map.

It is a question of the tiles are even a derived work of the styles
exactly,

lets think about this longer, but lets say, the color red is contained in
the style to show that a street is under construction. This color red is
displayed on a tile.

The color of the pixels contains data that is copied from the style, but
the rules to select that style are not, the definition of the style is not
conveyed, only the effect of that style is.
For example if were to copy trademarked strings, top secret information etc
that would be an issue. The copyright issues of styles are limited to that
which is copied into the map.  So symbols, string literals, trademarked
strings etc would all be issues to look at deeply.

Now if you are to distribute these styles in a mapcss that would be a
different issue, but I am talking here about mapnik rendering with no user
interaction with the rendering process.

This is similar to the issue of providing the output of a modified gcc
compiler that compiles the users source code, you would also not have to
provide your private modications to the compiler, I guess if the compiler
was licensed under the agpl you could not make a public webservice .

The same thing would be with providing an online web service that would
render on demand for users, maybe that in theory could fall under
propagation of a style sheet if you were provide an interactive service
that needs to use an AGPLed styles.
I am still not clear on how much interaction here would be an issue, if
your software itself is interacted with and you only read the agpled styles
as data we might have a very weak case for AGPLd protection.

mike

-- 
James Michael DuPont
Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova http://flossk.org
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