[OSM-legal-talk] Re: [OSM-talk] about freedom in PD/BSD/MIT/Apache

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sat, Jul 08, 2006 at 01:25:24AM +0200, Thomas Walraet wrote:
> Lars Aronsson a écrit :
> >
> >With this reasoning, I don't really understand how you draw the 
> >line to the "NC" component of the CC license.  What if the 
> >marketing guy says "wait, they have a CC-SA license" and then they 
> >find a way to comply with that, just like Red Hat Linux complies 
> >with GPL or like the publisher Directmedia Gmbh in Berlin complies 
> >with GFDL when they publish the German Wikipedia on DVD. What if a 
> >company complies with the viral license and still makes a lot of 
> >money from our unpaid work, is that ok?
> 
> Share-Alike, aka copyleft, is not something made to forbid commercial 
> uses. ("viral" is not very pleasant)
> 
> With copyleft and attribution, every company that use OSM data help the 
> project by spreading our work and increasing OSM notoriety.
> I have no problem with a company making lot of money from our work if 
> they comply with the license.

Without copyleft, every company that uses OSM data still
helps the project by spreading the work and increasing OSM notoriety. If
you don't think that the TeleAtlas/NavTeq name being on the bottom of
every GMap has helped to launch their names into the spotlight of the
web-viewing public, I'd have to say you're dreadfully mistaken.

The problem is that it's not legally permissable to use OSM data
combined with data which is not able to be shared. This means that we
could not, for example, create an image file which contained
(appropriately licensed) Ordnance Survey coverage data map combined with
a map of OSM data coverage. Nor is it possible to make a map of, for
example, phone book entries on top of OSM data. Nor any of several other
use cases that OSM could be very valuable for.

If I have images I want a road map on top of, and I don't want to pay
TeleAtlas licensing fees, I can't use OSM data to make the road maps on
top of my images, unless I also release the images.

I will state right now that I have never made a use case of the OSM data
which complies with the OSM license. In fact, the current
london.freemap.in demos are violating the OSM license. I have produced
derivative works of the OSM data that I have not shared. I have taken
data extracted from another database (OpenGuides) and plotted it on top
of OSM -- but I didn't share the data that I collected from OpenGuides.
I've published the tools to do all these things, but I am not sharing
the underlying data.

So, if we're going to be strict about requiring copyleft, then I should
stop my efforts right now. The data underlying the london.freemap.in
demos is not publicly available -- I'm violating the copyleft terms of
the OSM license. 

Is what I'm doing a violation of the spirit of OSM? I don't think so.
But it's a legal violation of the license under which the data is
released, as I understand it. Nobody is upset about it -- because it's
useful, I'd assume. I've never been called on not participating in full
copyleft -- probably because I've come close enough. 

But the fact that every demo I've done, some of which people have
considered hugely useful, is legally a violation of the OSM license as
my activities stand, seems to me like something that should be taken
into account when considering what the OSM license should be, in my
opinion.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer