[OSM-legal-talk] License for OSM tiles

[TimSC]

Hi all,

With the CTs/ODbL upon us, I was wondering about the tiles on the 
default layer on the OSM web page. The license change is based on the 
premise that CC-BY-SA is not appropriate for data*. The LWG are pushing 
to drop the CC-BY-SA license for data extracted from OSM and go with a 
single license**. My question is are we keeping the CC-BY-SA license for 
OSM tiles, which is a "produced work" under ODbL? or would be better to 
change?

My opinion is we should stay with a standard license for tiles that 
makes interoperability with other data easy. Therefore we should stay 
within the creative commons family of licenses as being very mainstream. 
We might want to move to a more liberal license though - from CC-BY-SA 
to CC-BY or CC0. I am involved with two projects in Kent, UK that 
require tracing the location of new features over a map - and at the 
moment I don't recommend SA licensed tiles for that. This forces me into 
OS's arms with their BY type OpenData. I would prefer to use a crowd 
sourced map that is not SA for tiles. (Unless I can trace over OSM tiles 
without violating the current tile license, which I don't think is 
possible.)

Any thoughts?

TimSC

PS I could try to argue that "OSM is a data project" so the tiles should 
be licensed as liberally as possible, but even _I_ don't buy that argument!


* this is disputed but ignored for now
** I strongly oppose this, but moving on