[OSM-legal-talk] OS Opendata & the new license

[Paul Williams]

Hello,

On 29 September 2010 18:19, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
...
>
> Why, of course! You will be able to use OS OpenData under the rules they
> come under. This is completely independent of OSM. Even if OSM's and OS's
> licenses were totally incompatible that would not reduce the usefulness of
> one or the other. If you mean "use this (OS) data to create new objects in
> OSM", please don't!
>

If this were the case, it would actually greatly reduce the potential
usefulness of OSM and OS OpenData in my opinion. By combining our
surveys with OS data we can produce something far better than either
alone. It isn't as simple as just using one as a base layer. For
example buildings on OS StreetView can be named, addressed, and have
whatever appropriate tags placed on it, following a survey by a OSM
contributor. I have done this in parts of Derby - see
http://osm.org/go/eu26CMrCH- for example, and I've seen that other
people have done this in various other areas eg SE
Birmingham/Solihull, and the map has been dramatically improved as a
result. OS data is also useful in combination with GPS trails to map
roads more accurately - particularly where the GPS track is poor, and
wanders all over the place. There are plenty of other ways how OSM
surveying and OS data can be combined.

I don't particularly want to be involved in this seemingly endless
licence discussion (I'm in favour of the change, provided the LWG is
correct in saying this issue is resolved, and there is no major data
or contributor loss), but have felt unhappy about such comments as
those quoted above that the OS data doesn't matter and so it doesn't
matter whether the licence is compatible - I and I am sure many other
people find the OS data to be a very useful tool for their mapping.

Cheers
Paul
(Paul The Archivist)