[OSM-legal-talk] Best license for future tiles?

Ed Avis eda at waniasset.com
Thu Nov 18 10:19:38 GMT 2010


Rob Myers <rob at ...> writes:

>>Yes, this is one of the more unpleasant aspects of the licence, at least under
>>some interpretations.  It's allowed to make proprietary, all-rights-reserved
>>map renderings, but if you want to produce a truly CC-licensed or public
>>domain one you can't.  (This refers to the no-tracing restrictions; an
>>attribution requirement is more reasonable.)
> 
>You can produce CC-licensed work from ODbL/DbCL data.

That's what you say, and I hope it is true.  But others claim different things;
some say that even once the work such as a printed map has been produced and
distributed under CC-BY-SA or even CC0 terms, it is still tainted somehow, such
that some legal force field prevents you from freely tracing it or otherwise
turning it into machine-readable form.

If this definitely isn't the case then it would be good to see a definitive
statement to that effect, preferably attached to the licence itself.

I know it sucks to have to refute every canard that somebody somewhere comes up
with about the bogeyman ODbL, but this is in my view one of the big problems with
the licence: it's so vague and complicated that if you ask three people about
what it permits you get four answers.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>




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