[OSM-legal-talk] Paid services from OSM

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Thu Oct 9 23:09:09 BST 2008


Hi,

Simon Ward wrote:
> Merely processing into a different format needs to be clarified.  If
> someone takes OSM ways + nodes + relations and imports it into PostGIS
> without changing any of it, I see that as processing into a different
> format.  I believe that PostGIS DB should be freely available.

Either I am misreading half of what you say, or you are concerned very 
little about the usability of OpenStreetMap after the license change.

We're drifting towards a system where people update their mirrors every 
minute (OSMXAPI is a good example here). It is simply not possible to 
offer (a) a *current* database dump from OSMXAPI to anyone who requests 
it at any time, or (b) direct read access to the OSMXAPI database to 
anyone except what the API provides. [Going out on a limb with (b) as I 
don't know the internals of OSMXAPI but if it were PostGIS based then 
(b) would certainly hold.]

If I combine your statement above with

> “reasonable” is too variable.  The derived database should be made
> available as the product using the data is.

Then this means basically that OSMXAPI would have to shut down, and our 
own Mapnik tileserver would probably never get beyond importing one 
planet file per day because every planet file import would mean, at the 
same time, that a PostGIS dump has to be made available and this might 
simply take too long to be usable.

Bye
Frederik




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