[OSM-legal-talk] Licensing implications when extending POI with external metadata

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi Joao,

On 21 January 2011 16:32, Joao Neto <joao.p.neto at gmail.com> wrote:
> Great points Anthony. Thanks for sharing!
> To be honest I think the share-alike aspect of the license is too
> restrictive and working against the project. The most successful projects in
> the open source / community space all seem to have a very healthy balance
> between individual contribution and private contribution/investment. I think
> the share-alike requirement is killing the potential for growing a private
> ecosystem. In my opinion there aren't that many sustainable business models
> in this space where companies can freely share their data. If you do that,
> then eventually someone will copy your data and business model. With your
> "differentiation factor" gone, you'll be out of business pretty soon.
> I'll investigate the possibility of building a business that generates
> significant contribution to OSM POI data, but I'm skeptical that it can be
> made profitable while sharing data with the competition.

The hope here is that the availability of "open" data like that of OSM
will change this view at one point and the business models will
change.  If your differentiation factor is data it'll probably be
harder to stay on the market.  But it'll be much easier to enter the
market for those that make creative uses of data, which is what the
contributors of a project like this will often want (what I want
anyway) -- more creative uses, more new uses, more advanced
technology, faster.  If the underlying data can be crowdsourced fro
free then, for me, there is no need for a company to exist that will
do the same thing commercially and it's only better if the company
directs efforts elsewhere.

I see the situation as a little similar to when open-source software
wasn't yet popular and people thought it was a funny idea that it
would be exploitable commercially.

Cheers