[OSM-legal-talk] Editing Derived Database Extracts and ODbL
Ben Supnik
bsupnik at xsquawkbox.net
Tue May 18 16:45:43 BST 2010
Hi Y'all,
I'm trying to wrap my head around the "give-back" clause in ODbL, that
is, the requirement to publish not only a produced work, but also the
modified database, if modding the DB was part of creating the produced work.
"Share-Alike: If you publicly use any adapted version of this database,
or works produced from an adapted database, you must also offer that
adapted database under the ODbL."
(I am trusting/hoping the human readable terms match the legalese.)
So...my question is: how _useful_ does the derived database have to be?
I understand that if I simply filter the planet extract (by keeping only
ways with certain tags) I do need to publish the derived DB, but can do
so by posting the source code I used to filter. I suppose that while
this example is trivial, there could be database processing that is
interesting enough to make this valuable to the community.
But, what if I do something really rude like remove all of the node IDs?
The derived database might have some very useful properties, but it
will be a truly royal PITA to apply back to OSM. The result would be a
sort of "dead patch" that meets legal requirements but can't be used.
I ask not because I am looking for a clever way to make my diffs
useless, but rather because a lot of the processing I do on the database
_does_ strip off the identity information needed to produce diffs/patches.
Yet another case of this: if I have a road editing program and I add
.osm import to it, a re-export to "OSM format" might again be useless if
the editing program hasn't tracked object identity for nodes, ways, etc.
in a consistent manner.
Does the ODbL require any "usefulness" to diffs, or only that the
available database materials exactly match any temporary database used
to create a produced work?
cheers
Ben
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