[OSM-legal-talk] Share-Data Licenses and OSM

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Wed Feb 28 12:57:52 GMT 2007


Hi,

    advocates of CC-BY-SA say that SA is a way to ensure that  
something is given back to OSM from people building on top of OSM.  
Others have pointed out that the "SA" only affects the finished  
product, not the intermediate geodata, and thus might not be worth a  
lot to OSM (example: guy makes copy of OSM London map data, spends  
two years refining it, publishes printed atlas - only the printed  
atlas must be shared, not his data). There have been calls to extend  
or modify our license to include a "share-data" aspect, i.e. asking  
for any "geodata" created on top of OSM to be published/copylefted.

(For the record, I am still in favour a full PD approach, but that  
doesn't prevent me from thinking about other models and how they  
would work.)

Let us assume for a moment that we had such a share-data license in  
place. How would that work? Assume someone makes a copy of OSM data  
and makes changes to it - correcting errors, adding his own tags or  
landmarks, whatever. He is, of course, not bound by any tagging rules  
that we employ for ourselves; what he creates will, in any but the  
most trivial cases, be incomaptible with OSM. In addition, OSM data  
also changes. Half a year later, the guy publishes his work, and duly  
makes his source geodata publicly availalbe.

What use will there be for OSM? If you gave me last month's planet  
file augmented by 100 segments and asked me to somehow "recapture"  
those into today's OSM, that would already be extremely difficult  
(how am I to tell whether a segment found in your planet file and not  
in our data was added by you and not just deleted by an OSM user?).  
Give me a planet file where you have made a lot of corrections, it  
becomes more difficult. Add your own tagging, and I'll have even more  
problems. Or publish the data in a format with higher complexity  
(adding information about lanes, turn restrictions, whatever), and  
I'll be completely screwed - your data simply cannot be put in OSM.

Not that such a publication would not be interesting to some "as is",  
if only to re-create modified version of whatever work was produced  
by the person. But I cannot for the life of me think of how we could  
ever capture the essence of such changes back into OSM, especially if  
whoever created the data does not cooperate.

My conclusion is that if we were to implement a share-data license  
with the express aim of OSM improvement by "getting something back",  
then "getting something back" must be very clearly defined, because  
just by publishing their derivates created from OSM data, nobody  
helps OSM.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'






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