[OSM-legal-talk] Cloudmade

[Adrian]

Hopefully someone here can explain this for me. Cloudmade have received 
a large amount of venture capital funding for their OSM based projects.

Public details are a little vague on Cloudmade's plans, and they haven't 
responded to my request for information, so this is a little bit 
guesswork, but they seem to be intending to make OSM toolkits and 
derived data products.

The legal FAQ says that derived data products (that are distributed) 
must be made available under the terms of the licence - I interpret that 
to mean for free, am I badly wrong?

That discounts a revenue stream from derived data products.

Similarly anyone using Cloudmade's toolkits to make derived products and 
then distributing them, even if it's just a paper map, would have to 
distribute the derived product for free too, so there doesn't seem much 
of a market for the tools.

Against that background I look at the OSM Foundation members and the 
Cloudmade founders and start to feel a little nervous that the same 
people that are driving licence change and have access to the database 
that the rest of us contributors don't are somehow trying to make money 
from OSM.