[OSM-legal-talk] An updated 'brief brief' for the new licence

Simon Ward simon at bleah.co.uk
Sat Oct 4 13:12:54 BST 2008


On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 09:27:08AM +0100, Rob Myers wrote:
> > 2) Ensure that if people use the OSM dataset (or a Derived Database) within
> > any publically available work that they should attribute OSM in the
> > resulting work appropriately for the medium, the space available and the
> > relative significance of the OSM data to their final work.
> 
> This is adware rather than copyleft and will not help the users of
> such systems to use the data freely as they encounter it.

Rather wording should be changed to say that existing notices not be
removed from the work.

If attribution will be as in (2): With respect to attributing
appropriately for the medium, etc I believe this need not be as visible
as currently (perceived to be) required with CC-by-sa.  There is no need
for the attribution to always be visible on a slippy map, for example.
An exported image could contain the attribution in its metadata.

A real life case I saw on one of the lists a while back (but did not get
around to responding to):  Someone had written a mobile application that
used OSM data.  I believe it would have been fine for them to attribute
in an about dialog, but some insisted that the precious space available
be used by an always visible attribution to OSM.  This should be one of
the use cases we test against (providing we can agree how the
attribution should work).

Simon
-- 
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that works.—John Gall
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