[OSM-legal-talk] Updated geocoding community guideline proposal

[Randy Meech]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 7:26 AM, Mikel Maron <mikel.maron at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a solid proposal and has my support.

+1

This is a great effort to clarify something that causes a lot of
confusion, and does so within the context of the current license. Very
productive!

> As long as the purpose of a geocoder is geocoding, and not reverse
> engineering OSM,
> then it sensibly fits within the notions of an ODbL produced work.

The biggest problem I've seen is companies wanting to geocode their
proprietary address databases with Nominatim or similar, but are
worried that storing the lat/lng results with trigger the ODbL. Having
built a geocoder, I think sufficient art goes into it that the results
should be considered a produced work. Of course a reverse engineered
OSM is different from geocoding your own address database and should
be prevented.

Adopting clear guidelines in support of geocoding over OSM data will
improve OSM, as a large number of developers would have the incentive
to clean up data. There is huge demand for permissive geocoders in the
development community.

> What I wonder is how we will move to decision making on the proposal? What's
> the OSMF process?

Having a decision one way or the other is important, either yes or no.
Because this work is certainly going to move forward somewhere, and it
would be a shame for it not to improve OSM.

-Randy