[OSM-legal-talk] Paid services from OSM

Simon Ward simon at bleah.co.uk
Thu Oct 9 23:10:35 BST 2008


On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 07:26:05AM -0700, Sunburned Surveyor wrote:
> I can think of three types of material changes that we would want
> contributed back to OSM:
> 
> [1] Modifications that improve (not degrade) the accuracy of a Feature geometry.
> [2] Modifications that improve (not degrade) the topology of a Feature geometry.
> [3] Modifications that improve (not degrade) the quality of the
> Feature Tags (attributes) of a Feature.
> 
> There are two other types of changes that would seem less critical to
> contribute back:
> 
> [4] Modifications that add Feature Tags (attributes) to a Feature.
> [5] Modifications that add Features.
> 
> It seems like #4 and #5 may be the type of modifications that make a
> derived database?
> 
> Dair wrote: "What I would like to come back would be any improvements
> they made to the
> OSM data; either by merging it with another database, correcting the OSM
> data, etc."
> 
> I would think that this complies with the spirit of the OSM license,
> correct? I don't care if you are adding some useless bit of
> proprietary information as a feature tag. However, if you are making
> more accurate feature geometries, I would be interested in that.

I’m told distinguishing between factual information with rights and that
without is hard.  Distinguishing between derived works that may improve
the data and derived works that don’t sounds even harder.  I think it’s
better not to attempt to and just make the derived works available to
those you distribute your product to.

All of the discussion is very OSM centric at the moment.  Granted, it is
about a new licence for OSM, but we shouldn’t try to tie it specifically
to OSM.

If, for whatever reason, OSM itself becomes unavailable, or someone
somewhere does not have access to it, but they have access to a derived
work, should they be denied access to the data that makes this usable
just because it may be of lower quality?

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