[OSM-legal-talk] Paid services from OSM

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> To be clear if you are only using the standard public OSM Dataset then you
> wouldn't have to publish any derivative dataset because there isn't one.

I don't think we should over-regulate things but technically, strictly, 
legally speaking if you run osm2pgsql on the planet file you have 
already created a derivative dataset. If you then use this to serve map 
images to the public, the license could be used to force you to provide 
the contents of your pgsql data base to the public.

You might be running a version of osm2pgsl that imports minutely diffs 
into your database. Providing minutely dumps of your database would 
however be impractical (creating them takes more than a minute). So your 
only avenue would be to grant public read access to your psql database, 
right? (Which of course is a security and performance nightmare, you can 
bring down any Postgres server with an evil query.)


This would also be true for our own psql database that sits behind the 
Mapnik rendering - a very strict reading of the current license draft 
would require you to make some sort of SQL dump available, I guess - it 
is probably not enough to simply say "I used the planet dump and 
processed it with osm2pgsql".

(Note that I'm playing advocatus diaboli here, it's not that I *want* 
this to be the case, I'm just looking for ways the proposed license 
could backfire!)

Maybe the license needs some provision that says you *either* have to 
make your derived database public *or* provide documentation that 
explains how you created the database using publicly available tools 
from publicly available sources. In that case, the aforementioned map 
provider could just say: "The map you see here is based on OSM data 
processed by osm2pgsql with daily patches applied", rather than having 
to make available a full dump or grant people read access to his RDBMS.

Another thing we could do is put in a provision that says if your data 
is permanently updated, it is sufficient to provide regular snapshots to 
the public instead of the live thing.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"