[OSM-legal-talk] Exception in Open Data License/Community Guidelines for temporary file

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 06/22/11 15:18, ThomasB wrote:
> My point is that a user of software, and this is not limited to Garmin map
> software, may not know what a software does in the background i.e. if it is
> creating a (temporary) Derivative Database, a Collective Database or
> whatever.

Yes. The software might well be proprietary, and so the user would not 
have a chance to really know.

In today's operating systems, whether something is in a file or in 
memory is a boundary that might easily get blurred. It would be kind of 
strange if one algorithm that chooses to build a giant data structure in 
memory (using, for example, a lot of swap space) would be treated 
differently from another algorithm that does exactly the same, but 
writes its data out to a temporary file (which might be a database).

I think that your attempt at solving this problem is a bit complicated 
but I don't have a brilliant idea either. We might just have to live 
with the fact that the same end product, created using different paths, 
may result in different ODbL requirements.

Bye
Frederik