[OSM-legal-talk] Cloudmade

[Richard Fairhurst]

Adrian wrote:

> Hopefully someone here can explain this for me.

I'll try!

> 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?

You are. The licence, like all open source licences, doesn't concern  
itself with whether you charge or not.

What it says is that, when you give someone a derived product, they  
then have the right to redistribute it under the terms of the  
licence. This can be for free if you like, or you can charge.  
Ultimately it will _probably_ gravitate towards free but there's  
nothing to enforce that.

The proposed new licence doesn't change that at all. It simply draws  
the dividing lines between "derived" and "collective" more clearly  
for data purposes, and makes it easier for us to reintegrate such  
data into OSM. It's neither weaker nor stronger than CC-BY-SA, just  
different and, for our purposes, more appropriate.

CloudMade's business model is no concern of mine, but plenty of  
companies have thrived by offering "services" connected with  
similarly-licenced software (RedHat and Linux is the most famous  
example), and CM, I'd guess, see this kind of opportunity with OSM.  
And good luck to them.

> 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.

I'm one (have long been one) of the people driving licence change,  
and don't have any interest in CloudMade: in fact on one occasion I  
actually bristled a lot at something they were proposing (see talk  
passim, "The future of Potlatch"). Nor do I have any special access  
to the database - well, not since I took the SQL out of  
amf_controller ;) .

I've simply seen, as have others, lots of practical problems with the  
current licence, and believe that the proposed replacement solves  
most of these. (Bear in mind that Creative Commons, who actually  
wrote our current licence, would have us dedicate all of OSM's data  
to the public domain - which, though I like it personally, offers  
_no_ legalistic safeguards against the sort of thing you're concerned  
about.)

cheers
Richard