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

[Dair Grant]

rob at robmyers.org wrote:

>This is Parallel Distribution. We (the cc-licences mailing list)
>discussed it during the CC 3.0 public review. My personal opinion is
>that it is not a good idea because there is so much room for
>mischief in it.

Personally I feel this is a good step forward from the current 
licence; it allows the OSM data to be used more widely, and 
doesn't sacrifice the ability to get back useful improvements to 
the data.


>Rather than adding the complexity and potential for locking people
>out that parallel distribution introduces, and the burden of
>maintaining it for re-distributors, it is better to simply prohibit
>technological protection measures being added by anyone other than
>the end user of the data when they install the previously
>unprotected data onto their own devices.

I'm not sure what you are saying here, but the situation I had 
in mind is that I work on some commercial software that would 
like to use OSM data.

To do that we would need to pre-process OSM data into our own 
proprietary format - which involves lossy compression, 
encryption, building extra meta-data like routing tables, etc.

I would like to be able convert OSM data into this format, use 
it in our app, and make available a reference copy of the 
snapshot we started from.


I'm hoping the intent of 4.6 was to ensure that if OSM went 
away, and our proprietary map was the only copy of the database 
in existence, we would have to make the raw .osm available to 
the world (which is good, IMO).

I don't really want to have to make our app accept .osm data as 
input, since it would be unusable (being able to pre-process at 
runtime isn't feasible: the USA takes about 2 days prep on a 
2Ghz quad-core Mac Pro, so we can't ask someone on an 800Mhz 
iBook to wait a week...).

I don't really want to have to de-compress our copy of the data 
into .osm format, since I don't think it would be very useful to 
OSM (we could certainly do it, but since the compression is 
lossy it would produce a bunch of nodes in different positions 
and so couldn't be diff'd against OSM to identify changes or 
confirm there are none).

However I would like to be able to let end-users flag up 
bugs/make changes to map data, which we could feed back into OSM somehow.


I think this is a good model, since it benefits all parties: our 
app gets to use OSM data, our users get to see OSM data, and OSM 
gets back useful changes.

The proposed licence looks like a really good model for geodata 
to me, as it understands that there are two goals - to encourage 
wide-spread useage of the data (even commercial use), and to 
pull back useful changes (and they have to be useful: having 
someone send back "node X is now at 51.12" is pointless when the 
real OSM data puts node X at 51.1200345).


-dair (irrespective of the final licence, I'd like to thank the 
OSMF and everyone involved in drawing this up - it is really 
encouraging to see the amount of effort that has gone into this)
___________________________________________________
dair at refnum.com              http://www.refnum.com/