[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] OT: Re: License

[Rob Myers]

Nic Roets wrote:
>> GPL prevents people from combining "[only] freely distributable" work
>> with "[only] non-freely distributable work".
> 
> GPL only tries to prevent this. In practise commercial software
> vendors made sure that their products are not part of the same process
> / does not run in the same memory space as GPL software (like the
> linux kernel). Then they could claim on a technical level that they
> are not combining their software with GPL software. 

The actual claim they must make is that their work is not a derivative 
of the GPL-ed work, which usually means that they must prove that they 
do not link to it. There are ways of trying to get around this but you 
have to fulfil some fairly stringent requirements and for anything other 
than simple tools it is a pain.

Web services are another matter, but the GPL-3 allows for measures to 
tackle those.

> But ask a Linux
> user were the kernel stops and Netscape / Acroreader begins...

The kernel stops mostly at glibc, and Netscape / Acrobat are very 
unlikely to access it directly.

> That's what why it makes no sense to me for OSM to use CC, GPL or
> LGPL. Anyone looking at say the applet can see that the OSM data and
> the Yahoo imagery belongs to different layers. So it cannot be
> "combining" to the extent where the one copyright infects the other.
> Yahoo knows it and that's why we have a deal with them.

Copyrights don't "infect", and if layers of a presentation don't lead to 
a derivative work then the copyleft requirements of CC-BY-SA or the GNU 
licenses will not be triggered.

> So if anyone ever wants to bundle a commercial map with the OSM map,
> he must just use software or transparent paper or something that makes
> it clear where OSM stops and where it begins. 

As with software, "mere aggregation" or "collective works" does not 
trigger copyleft. So "bundling" would not affect the commercial 
(actually proprietary) map.

Superimposing the proprietary map will only be useful if it matches the 
underlying free map. In which case it is either a derivative work or 
both maps are a faithful representaion of uncopyrightable facts such as 
the GPS positions of a road.

> Oh ye and if OSM goes
> GPL or LGPL he must provide the user with a procedure to extract and
> replace the OSM vector data, which usually not difficult because we
> are talking of MAPS after all.

This is not the case. If the map is licenced then it is the map that 
must be available in "source" format, not the data that was used to 
create it. If I modify Netscape to produce Robscape, I must provide the 
source to the latter not the former.

This all *really* needs legal afvice.

- Rob.