[OSM-legal-talk] moving up the stack

[Jon Stockill]

SteveC wrote:
> Lars Aronsson wrote:
>> Robert Hart wrote:
>>
>>> Somebody commented to me recently that they were put off getting
>>> involved with OSM because it seemed to them that whole thing had been
>>> devised by Steve as a way to make a heap of money from other peoples'
>>> effort.
>> Out of curiosity, how on earth did they get that impression?  And 
>> is there anything Steve could have done differently to change 
>> that?
> 
> Dear god, if only I'd had the foresight.
> 
> I do like the evil-steve theories though, keep them coming!

Do you own a white cat?

How's the acquisition of the top floor office in Docklands going? ;-)

On a slightly more serious note - the balance of a sharealike data 
license and a more open license for "finished products" does seem to 
strike a sensible balance - this does of course present the question of 
where to draw the line, but definitions of such things are probably best 
left to well informed legal types.

 From my point of view I got involved with OSM because I was looking for 
free geodata to build simulator scenery. There wasn't anything 
sufficiently detailed, and OSM provided the infrastructure for me to go 
out and start collecting data myself. I benefit from everyone elses data 
collection, they benefit from mine, but at the end of the day if we 
can't all use the data in the ways we have in mind then people will be 
pushed away from the project.

I'm sure I'm not alone in using OSM data with other data sets. I 
currently use SRTM for elevations, VMAP0 for coastlines, roads, rivers, 
etc (hopefully to be replaced with OSM at some point), and a database 
full of GPL'd 3d models to sit on top of all that. Whatever the final 
license choice is it needs to remain compatible with the inclusion of 
other layers which aren't/can't be released under a sharealike license.

There have already been discussions about what should/shouldn't be 
included in OSM - if we're not going to include *everything* (which 
would be a silly idea) then people are going to want to use other 
sources of data with the OSM data - we shouldn't do anything to 
discourage that.

-- 
Jon Stockill
lists at stockill.net