[OSM-legal-talk] Lawyer responses to use cases, major problems

Simon Ward simon at bleah.co.uk
Sun Mar 1 11:04:02 GMT 2009


On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 10:35:21AM +0100, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Simon Ward wrote:
> >> this could mean that 
> >> anyone running osm2pgsql importing minutely data updates would possibly 
> >> have to make available a ''psql dump of the whole planet'' for any 
> >> snapshot time where someone cares to request it.
> > 
> > So be it.
> 
> Do you have any suggestion on how to achieve this technically?

For such a large amount of data, not much if you actually had to
redistribute the entire data yourself, but see below.

> > ODbL already defines derivatives, produced works and collective
> > databases separately, and is much more permissive for the latter two.
> > Distribute a derived database, share it please.
> 
> This is not about the distribution of a derived database; if I already 
> have the database in a form that can be distributed, then sharing it is 
> trivial.

> My question is about the distribution of a Produced Work and whether or 
> not the underlying derived database needs to be made available even if 
> it does not have any value added. 

Then you you have more than one thing here:

  * A derivative database, consisting of the original database imported
    into PostGIS.

  * A produced work, consisting of the derivative database and other
    elements.

> To make the exampe clear:
> 
> http://c.tile.openstreetmap.org/7/63/42.png
> 
> would, under the new license, be a "Produced Work". It is based on 
> nothing more than is available at planet.openstreetmap.org, imported 
> into a PostGIS database which is updated once a minute.
> 
> […]                  our own tile server would have to 
> be scaled back to once-a-day updates because we could not possibly 
> produce the PostGIS dumps once an hour.

If your tileserver also provides the ability to directly query the
derivative database, then I think you should be obliged to distribute
the database.  If you just have a tile browser, then probably not.  It
gets more difficult when you start providing things like place name
searching:  Is that still acceptably a produced work, or are you
providing access to the database?  I would err towards providing the
database.

If you do have to offer the derived database, you may not have to worry
about providing frequent dumps.  The licence specifically allows for
distributing the whole database, or simply a file containing the
alterations made.  It doesn’t say how the differences should be encoded,
so I think it’s reasonable to document that you used osm2pgsql, osmosis,
or other, and exactly how you used it (command line arguments, inputs,
etc).  Richard has already commented on the relevant this part of the
license (4.6(b))[1].

[1]: http://www.co-ment.net/text/844/

This does bring up some other questions though:

What if the software doesn’t produce predictable results each time it is
run?  This could possibly be solved by extending the software to produce
a trace of operations that it or another tool could process to perform
exactly the same transformation of the database.  This could become
quite large though, so we’re back to distributing large amounts of data
with frequent updates.

In case you used an old version of the software that may no longer be
distributed by the authors but could produce different results, should
you provide the exact software you used?

Can you just specify how you import the original database, and how each
diff is imported, or do you have to document the whole process of
importing and provding minutely updates?

Simon
-- 
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that works.—John Gall
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