[OSM-legal-talk] Guidelines on interpretation of section 4.6 od ODbL

[David Groom]

One of the main requirements of compliance with ODbL [1] is set out in 
Section 4.6.    As yet there are no community guidelines on how OSM / OSMF 
interprets this section.

There seem to be at least three areas where guidelines might be necessary:

A)  The term "offer"  as used in the first paragraph of section 4.6 "You 
must also offer to recipients ".  I would have thought this means that 
whenever you  publicly use a Derivative Database or a Produced Work from a 
Derivative Database then you must instantly comply with the remainder of 
section 4.6.  I may have misunderstood Frederick, but I infer from his 
comment "....so in effect if someone ever asks you......" [2] that he 
believes you only have to comply with the requirements of section 4.6 when 
asked.

B)  The first para of section 4.6 states "You must also offer ..... in a 
machine readable form".  What do we believe "machine readable form" means? 
For instance if  I produce a printed map, is it OK to have printed 
instructions on how to produce the derivative database, on the basis that an 
OCR program can read the printed instructions, and it is thus machine 
readable?

C)   In section 4.6(b) what does the "OR" relate to.  It could mean

(i) "A file containing all of the alterations made to the Database" OR " the 
method of making the alterations to the Database (such as an 
algorithm)...."; ie a file or the method
(ii) A file containing "all of the alterations made to the Database" OR 
"the method of making the alterations to the Database (such as an 
algorithm)..." ie a file which contains all the alterations OR a file which 
contains the method.

I realise that some on this list may think I'm being picky, that I'm looking 
for an insignificant comma here or there, but the fact is that if we do not 
know how to interpret the ODbL then how will we answer when others ask us 
how to interpret it?

Regards

David





[1]  http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/
[2] 
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2011-June/006272.html