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

[Richard Fairhurst]

Frederik Ramm wrote:

> 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.

It's a difficult one. The GPL has the same problem, of course. For a  
while, Apple looked like they were "forking" KHTML with Safari - in  
other words, though they were publishing the changes they made, they  
weren't publishing them in a format that made it easy to reintegrate  
them into Konqueror.

Happily, the two now seem to be co-operating better, and a lot of  
developments coded for Safari go back into Konqueror. I'm not sure  
that it's possible to legislate for everything in a licence, nor that  
it's a good idea to do so.

That said, as OSM tools get better and translations in and out of  
other formats (e.g. shapefiles) become more common, it should becoming  
less and less of an issue.

cheers
Richard