[OSM-legal-talk] Cloudmade

[Nic Roets]

I'm not too worried. Cloudmade received something like $2m at a time when it
was easy to raise money. So those investors may realistically expect to make
only tens of millions of dollars over the next few years. Compare that with
the $10b odd that TeleAtlas and NavTech sold for at the same time.

So Cloudmade do not need to do anything sneaky to make money. If they are
the first and only company to do a variety of things with OSM data add a
little bit of value with a little bit of proprietary software they may do
just fine. In other words occupy niches that FOSS does not intend to cover.

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 9:03 PM, Adrian <osmmail at ajw.me.uk> wrote:

> 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.
>
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