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

[Tobias Knerr]

Kai Krueger wrote:
> Am I allowed to declare my png mapnik tile as a "derived database", stick an
> ODbL label on it an be done with it?
> 
> Then I don't have to reverse engineer my render to figure out if or if not
> it produces an internal database and worry about having to maintaining a
> snapshot of that database for ever and what legal consequences there might
> be if my dog eats the backup, etc. I'd be back to the simplicity of
> CC-BY-SA, i.e. that all obligations of the licenses are met within the work
> I hand out itself and have no additional work (or worries) beyond producing
> the product in the first place. 

+1, I couldn't have expressed this better.

For many use cases, it's a massive burden that you need to hand out
other things besides the product you originally wanted to produce. The
worst part is, of course, that nobody seems to be able to tell you with
any certainty what these "things" are. But even without that
uncertainty, it's often just plain impractical:

Right now, Joe Mapper can download a 3D renderer/viewer (= use case
which is relevant for me personally), load an .osm file to have a
virtual landscape generated, fly around a bit, hit PrtSc to take a
snapshot of his carefully-mapped home town and proudly publish it on his
blog, make it available on gnome-look.org as a desktop background or
whatever. The requirement to publish the image with a CC-BY-SA label
attached seems perfectly reasonable and easy to comply with.
But with ODbL, he suddenly might have to publish the "temporary
database" that the 3D renderer created in the process. He will not even
understand what he needs to do, and if he did, he'd have a hard time
uploading that x00 MB binary blob to gnome-look.org alongside with his
desktop background. And nobody would want it anyway!

-- Tobias Knerr