[OSM-legal-talk] Software using open street map data and Licensing model / restrictions

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Alex wrote:
> My mobile client will download the tiles that I will have generated
> and display them with Point of Interest information that will be
> coming from OSM, commercial data, and user generated content / POIs .
> 
> What I want to know is if my application itself and my website (that
> will be presenting a google/OSM style Ajax map)  has to be licensed
> under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0

No, you are free to license your application any way you like.

> or is it only
> the subset of OSM data the I will be working with ?

If you produce tiles that contain OSM data then those tiles - including 
all commercially sourced data depicted on them - must be licensed 
CC-BY-SA, i.e. anyone is free to trace the commercial data off the 
tiles. You can only circumvent that effect by creating overlay tiles and 
display them on top of each other in the client (i.e. base tiles from 
OSM = CC-BY-SA, overlay tiles with commercial data = proprietary license).

> What exactly can I do with the OSM licensing model when I use OSM data
> into my application (note that the data is not included as-is in the
> app but downloaded as tiles inside my client)

Anything you produce from OSM data must be CC-BY-SA licensed (e.g. if 
you compile OSM data into some special compressed map format for your 
application then these special compressed files must by CC-BY-SA). If 
you mix OSM data with someting else into an end product then that end 
product must also be CC-BY-SA. If your application displays OSM data 
loaded from file 1 and proprietary data loaded from file 2, then you can 
keep the licenses separate.

Bye
Frederik

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