[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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