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

[Richard Bullock]

>Sure, the licence to the produced work. So how is a substantial portion
>of the original database structure and contents going to be accidentally
>recreated in this scenario?
>
>I don't think it will be possible to accidentally "reverse engineer" the
>DB, and if you intentionally "reverse engineer" it, you cannot claim
>independent creation.


OK, imagine the following;
Suppose that some time from now, OSM has moved to ODBL - and a group has 
forked OSM using the last CC-BY-SA planet file - for the sake of argument 
call it OSM-CC.

The original OSM project, with the database under ODBL still releases its 
map tiles on its main website under CC-BY-SA.

Presumably, the OSM-CC project would be well within their rights to use the 
OSM created map tiles as a background layer in JOSM / Potlatch etc. to allow 
users to trace map data. The data created is derived from the CC-BY-SA 
tiles - and so must therefore also be under a CC-BY-SA licence. Therefore 
it's compatible with the OSM-CC project.

With sufficient resources, the OSM-CC project could in theory create a 
substantially similar database to that of the main OSM project - although 
it's extremely unlikely to be identical.