[OSM-legal-talk] Understanding the new license - room for negotiation?

Sunburned Surveyor sunburned.surveyor at gmail.com
Fri Oct 31 17:39:55 GMT 2008


I've been encouraged to try and address my concerns with the new
license, as an alternative to pushing foward with the release of my
OSM data into the public domain. There is really one aspect of the new
license that is my biggest concern. I want to make sure that I
understand the issue properly, and that there is no room to negotiate
this aspect of the license. :]

Please tell me if you think this scenario is allowed under the proposed license:

My company collects road centerline geometry. We contribute that road
centerline geometry to OSM.
We then create land use polygons based on our road centerlines, but
only use our own data for this purpose. We don't use data downloaded
from OSM. (The data is essentially the same, at least until it is
modified by other OSM users.)
We release the land use polygons to our client.
The client publishes a map in a local newspaper featuring the land use
polygons we provided them.

Does the new license ever require my company to release the land use
polygon data in the above scenario?

In essence my company would be "dual licensing" the road centerline
data. We'd be keeping a copy that we could use for our own purposes,
including for the construction of data sets that we would never want
to be public, but we'd also submit a copy of the same data to OSM.

Landon




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