[OSM-legal-talk] Paid services from OSM

[Dair Grant]

Simon Ward wrote:

> I¹d rather those providing the PostGIS data be obliged to provide their
> source (planet dumps, whatever) to the same people.
...
> The example was convoluted, but I hope it illustrates my point that mere
> translation should not be excluded from being counted as a derived
> database.

If you're obligated to provide the source to your translation, providing
access to the translation itself seems pointless.

One difference between OSM usage and free software is that a great many uses
of OSM will be a one way process. Tags will be discard or translated from
the OSM model to a simpler model, IDs might be lost, coordinates might be
truncated, etc.

What's left might be useful for reconstructing OSM in an emergency, but the
planet dump that went into the process would be much more helpful.


If the data is just a translation from OSM (or some data literally derived
from it, like a precalculated routing table/simplified graph/etc) then
making that accessible is pointless.

If the data is augmented or modified in a significant way then by far the
best way (for everyone: OSM as a whole, and the translator) to pick up those
changes would be to simply insert them into OSM and pick them up downstream.

If that can't be done then, yes, those changes should be published in a form
that could be used by OSM.

I don't see that necessarily has to be via the translated database though. A
.osm patch, or a modified planet file, would be easier to create and easier
to merge in (if they turned out to be something we wanted).


I believe the goal should be to pick up changes that improve OSM, rather
than to use OSM as a lever to force open other file formats.

If the translation doesn't improve the OSM data, and you get the source
planet dump with the translation, what would you do with the translation
that you couldn't do better with the planet dump?

If the translation does improve the OSM data, but you get the source planet
dump plus the improvements as a .osm file, requiring the translation itself
be a public format seems excessive if the goal is to improve/protect OSM.


-dair
___________________________________________________
dair at refnum.com              http://www.refnum.com/