[OSM-legal-talk] License Change - Jakob Altenstein Bachelor Thesis

[Frederik Ramm]

Dear LWG,

    this is just for your information - not a request or action item.

There's a cartography student here in Karlsruhe who is doing his 
bachelor thesis at Geofabrik. From a number of possible topics I offered 
him, he chose this:

"Development and implementation of an alogrithm to evaluate and 
visualize the effect of the planned OSM license change on the data."

His task is more or less to produce a "license change map" like the 
red-green-orange-yellow maps we already have (that wasn't available when 
he started - I underestimated the speed with which the OSM community got 
that implemented). He will also have to produce a systematic write-up of 
the various possible "orange/yellow" situations where parts of an object 
are available for relicensing and others are not.

I also expect him to develop an algorithm that will somehow "filter out" 
what remains of an object after non-relicensed information has been 
stripped away. If he's good he will also take into account complex cases 
like a way having been split (which is then not visible from the object 
history).

All this is expected to be configurable so that you can e.g. define 
minor kinds of changes that don't yield copyright and see how the change 
in definition changes the output.

His thesis is supposed to be finished end of February. I guess I'll see 
some interim results in January and would of course share them with you.

As always, there's no guarantee that what he produces will have any use 
in practice. I assume that a lot of what he does will be duplicated by 
the community (most likely Peter Koerner who is doing similar work 
without an academic background) or by members of the LWG in the mean 
time, simply because people want answers to questions. Even so, I have 
mandated that his code and thesis be published under an open license so 
maybe once he has something to show we can use some his 
analysis/figures/code/whatever. If not, then that's not a problem - I 
told him and the professor beforehand that there's no knowing what OSM 
is up to and that there's no reason to assume the results will acutally 
be used in practice.

Bye
Frederik