[OSM-legal-talk] Public Domain versus CC Attribution Share Alike License

Nathan Vander Wilt nate-lists at calftrail.com
Thu Sep 4 05:32:49 BST 2008


On Sep 3, 2008, at 11:51 AM, Sunburned Surveyor wrote:
> The "public domain versus Creative Commons" debate sounds similar to
> the GPL versus LGPL debate that goes on in the open source software
> development world. The licensing of geodata is an area of great
> interest to me, and something I would like to learn more about,
> especially as it applies to OSM.

You may be interested to read the following post that discusses the  
existing and alternative licenses with regards to OSM:
http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262

There is also a wiki page that links to the proposed license(s) and  
also contains a bit of criticism of even the proposed changed license:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Open_Data_License

I found this response to be helpful regarding the "GPL vs. BSD" debate  
in the context of OSM:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2008-May/000983.html

> What can't you do with OSM data under the Creative Commons license
> that you couldn't do with data in the Public Domain? To me it seems
> like the only two (2) major differences are sharing your improvements
> to the data and attributing the work of OSM. That's basically it,
> correct?

Other posters have shared most of the worst pitfalls with the current  
CC-SA license. The proposed license does clarify a great deal (though  
some concerns regarding commercial use remain) but it is still only  
*proposed* and there is no estimate as to when or how it will be  
enacted as far as I know.

thanks,
-natevw




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