[josm-dev] [OSM-talk] Bing imagery now available in JOSM

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Thu Dec 2 00:25:17 GMT 2010


David,

David Murn wrote:
> This is a scary thought.  Does this mean the Bing licence has the same
> catch as the odbl licence, where 'we may change to any other licence in
> the future'?  Is there any hope of the licence being decided upon and
> not being changed in the future?  

Certainly yes and certainly no.

First, you cannot change the license in retrospect. So if they allow us 
to trace the data and contribute it to OSM now under certain terms, they 
cannot change their mind and have us remove the stuff later.

Second, of course they can terminate the agreement at any time (and 
replace it with something new). From that point on you would not be 
allowed to trace using the old terms but of course anything already 
traced under the old terms would remain. So yes, of course "they may 
change to any other licnese in the future".

> Should we wait until that stage, to
> ensure they dont screw us over, and once a big portion of map data is
> bing-derived, claim they own all derived works for themselves, which as
> its all tagged as coming from bing, they'd be legally entitled to do
> so.

I think we've learned our lesson from the past. We will only accept data 
sources that are compatible with our contributor terms, ensuring that 
data once contributed remains in OSM, no matter what we (or the data 
provider) do.

> It does sort of surprise me that licences can be drawn up for Bing in a
> matter of days (over a holiday weekend), but the odbl and CTs still
> cant reach agreement after (apparently) how many years since they were
> introduced.  It shows that if you really want things to happen, they
> can.

There are too many differences between both situations to enumerate here.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"



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