[OSM-legal-talk] Progressing OSM to a new data Licence regime

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> The idea of storing an optional 'PD?' preference per user is an  
> interesting one and we'd welcome feedback as to whether there'd be the  
> demand for this. Effectively this would be requesting that OSMF, or  
> anyone else, creates a public domain database from your contributions.

I have always been meaning to do that some time. If I cannot convince
the whole project to "go PD", I would at least want to have a "PD
view" which is a subset of OSM data that contains only stuff not
tainted by a viral license. 

This would be very hard to do externally as you need the full history
of everything, plus some automatic measure to determine wheter a
change by a non-PD user was "substantial". Tom Hughes is right in
saying that this is difficult but I think it is doable. 

(With the current state of the TIGER import, about 90% of our data is
probably PD. Of course this will become less and less as TIGER data is
manually changed by non-PD users.)

I would very much like to avoid a split and branch in the data to form
a PD body and a non-PD body of data, especially as I hope to convince
more people to make the switch and I want the switch to also affect
the data they collected before they decided to PD it. 

If, ultimately, one could query the same OSM database with an added
"license=pd" and would only get the unrestricted subset, I would be
a very happy man. 

Bye
Frederik

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