[OSM-legal-talk] Cloudmade

Nick Black nickblack1 at gmail.com
Mon Oct 6 03:32:45 BST 2008


Adrian and legal list,

I'm writing this email in my position as a founder and employee of CloudMade.


On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Adrian <osmmail at ajw.me.uk> wrote:
>> I'm sort of taking offence at your implied suggestion that there is one
>> group of people who "give" to the project and another group, among whom
>> you seem to count Cloudmade and would probably also count Geofabrik, of
>> people who "take" from the project to make a business.
>
> I'm sorry to have given that impression. I very much appreciate the
> effort that Steve, Nick and everyone else has put into OSM, and I hope
> that they, and you, are successful in making a profit from that effort.

Thanks! This whole discussion is about more than making profit - its
about the freedom to use map data in any way you see fit.  Thats why I
got involved with OSM - not because I wanted to make money, but
because I believe that the world is a better place when data and
software is free is an speech.  Its also my belief that that freedom
must extend to the ability to exchange goods, software, data or
services for a fee, allowing people to make money, buy houses,
computers, pay university fees.  This is a separate discussion, but
one which I'm happy to have (especially if its in a pub).

>
> This thread came about because I misunderstood the CC-By-SA licence and
> because I perceived Cloudmade couldn't be bothered to address my concerns.

I think this is a little harsh.  At CloudMade we try to answer public
emails as quickly as is possible - I personally answer buckets full of
emails about our products, APIs and our downloads service each day and
I know that Steve, Andy and the other guys answer their fair share of
emails as well.  On this occasion we failed to answer in a
satisfactory time - we acknowledge that and take responsibility for
it.  Right now we're looking into a ticketing system that we can use
to track emails to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again.
So if anyone knows a good free as in speech (we're happy to pay, but
we'd rather be able to hack at the source code if needed) ticketing
system, please shout out.

What I'd ask from you (Adrian) and from anyone else on the list is to
give us a bit more of a nudge before assuming that we're ignoring you.
 Ping me on Skype: nickb_sk, call me on +447835054292 and if that
doesn't work contact our awesome office manager, Germaine -
germaine at cloudmade.com who will make sure you get an answer.  Just for
clarity - I completely acknowledge that we should have replied to your
mail sooner and we are working to make sure the same thing doesn't
happen again.


>
> In the commercial world the data providers would take months pulling
> apart a reseller's business plan. I think the OSM contributors are due,
> morally if not legally, some of that respect.

Absolutely true.  I'm always happy to sit down with OSMers and tell
them what we are up to at CloudMade and so are Steve, Andy and our
team.  Transparency is really important to us, so we'll be looking at
making our website more informative.  Were you able to read through
our FAQ and About pages on cloudmade.com?  Could they be made more
useful?  As a result of your questions we're adding two more FAQs -
would these have answered your questions:

"Q. Can anyone sell and make money from OpenStreetMap maps?

A. All of the data in OpenStreetMap is licensed for use by the
individual contributors under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution Share Alike 2.0 License. The terms of the license allow
anyone to re-use the data in any way, so long as they give appropriate
attribution. This includes the right to re-sell the data, so yes,
anyone can make money from OpenStreetMap.

Q. Isn't that against the spirit of the project?

We don't think that this is against the spirit of the project.
OpenStreetMap was founded because most maps are not free and because
most map data is controlled in a way that blocks innovation and
creativity. By making OSM data available to people through our APIs
and by supporting the OSM project in other ways, we want to help make
OSM data even more accessible and help more people do more unexpected
and wonderful things with the data."

You might also find some of our presentations interesting:

http://www.slideshare.net/tag/cloudmade

These presentations for SOTM08 talk about how other people are using
OSM data in a commercial way:

Steve's Presentation from SOTM08 -
http://www.slideshare.net/SteveCoast/state-of-the-map-keynote-presentation/
Dair Grant, Route Buddy -
http://www.slideshare.net/dair/openstreetmap-vs-the-world
John McKerrell (then at Microsoft) -
http://www.slideshare.net/johnmckerrell/using-crowd-sourced-data-in-a-commercial-mapping-api
Ed Freyfogle - Nestoria - http://www.slideshare.net/lokku/sotm08

I hope this goes some way to answering your questions.  Lets take any
more questions off list (or start a new thread) as we're getting
rapidly off topic.

Best,


>
>
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>



-- 
Nick Black
--------------------------------
http://www.blacksworld.net




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