[OSM-legal-talk] Paid services from OSM

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Dair Grant wrote:
> Perhaps it's not worth treating the "translating the Database to a
> less-expressive form" case as different to any other modification case.
> 
> But it does seem a bit like jumping through hoops, when it would be simpler
> to say "I truncated all coordinates to 4 decimal places" or even "the DD is
> a subset of the information in version X of the D, and here's a copy of
> that".

I think this bit need serious work as it might, if handled carelessly, 
stifle creativity.

Say you take a planet dump or excerpt, make a shapefile, drop it into 
your favourite GIS tool, run some kind of rendering or filtering on it, 
maybe arrive at an SVG or PNG file, load it up in a graphics editor, 
make more changes, and after a number of steps arrive at something that 
looks cool on a T-shirt (like e.g. 
http://www.remote.org/frederik/tmp/shirt.png). The typical long night 
design job.

It is clear that you have made at least one derived database, and it is 
clear that you had some kind of "experience" at the end. Somewhere in 
between the database ceased to exist but this is something that is not 
part of your creative process, not something you even think about as you 
go back and forth between PostGIS, renderers, GIS software, bitmap 
editor, whatever. You might not even remember how you achieved a certain 
result. You are also very likely to throw away all intermediate results 
once your T-shirt design is sent to the printer as they are now irrelevant.

If I am not mistaken, then the new proposed license, as it stands, would 
require you to (a) identify the final "derived database" in the 
processing chain and (b) save it and make it available to everyone who 
gets a T-shirt.

Apart from this being pretty much useless to anybody (yes, Simon, I know 
that there may arise a situation where the world has been destroyed and 
the only thing that remains is the CD-ROM that was distributed with the 
T-Shirt from which we can now salvage a bit of OSM... but let's stick to 
those scenarios with a higher probability of entry for the time being!), 
it will burden the creative process with administrative decisions, apart 
from the fact that not everybody who designs a T-Shirt necessarily has 
the means to host a database for downloading.

(By the way, *for how long* would I have to make a database available 
after using it in a one-off gig like the T-shirt?)

This is a very murky area. We cannot even say that you only have to 
share additions or improvements to the database - because what is an 
improvement? If someone re-aligns a street in his local database copy 
based on precise measurements he has access to, then I want this 
improvement shared. If sets up his local copy of Potlach (the tool of 
choice for such operations!) and randomly moves 1.000 Central London 
nodes while urinating on a pile of Ordnance Survey maps and becomes a 
famous perforance artist then we don't *really* require him sharing his 
"improvement" even though it surely elevated OSM from the banal into the 
artistic Olymp with him.

But if we say you have to basically share everything you do to the 
database (as I understand the license to require now) then we make it 
unneccessarily hard for people to work with the data.

I'm tempted to say that if the data base is modified using some kind of 
original data input - from your GPS, from your company archives, from 
your Grandma's local knowledge - then ist has to be shared; if, on the 
other hand, you only apply algorithms or noise to it, then keep it an 
just tell us that your work is based on the so-and-so planet file. But 
I'm sure this, too, doesn't catch everything.

We must do everything we can to avoid making things more difficult for 
people than they are now (they are difficult enough already).

Bye
Frederik

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