[OSM-legal-talk] When should ODbL apply to geocoding

[Randy Meech]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 9:43 PM Tom Lee <tlee at mapbox.com> wrote:

> If more people can run geocoding services built on OSM data, more people
> will have an incentive to improve the map in order to improve their
> results. I'm not merely speculating: I spend most of my time working on the
> Mapbox geocoder these days. If, when a user reports a missing small town
> boundary for a reverse geocode, I could fix the problem by adding the
> boundary to OSM, I would be delighted.
>

Totally agreed on this. When we set up the free Nominatim service at
MapQuest years ago, part of the thesis (besides utilizing spare compute
power freed up by declining AOL dial-up customers ;) was to create a large
group of developers who would use the services and improve the data, an
effort that I believe was successful. I've heard many anecdotes of
individuals and teams doing just as Tom suggests -- fixing the data to
improve their geocoding results.

We talk of OSM as a community of individuals, but some of those individuals
are in companies and working on projects that need geocoding -- they can
improve the data in non-automated ways just like anyone else & should be
encouraged by clarity on the license.

We never worried about what people did with our Nominatim service, we
passed along the license and let people do what they wanted. I wonder how
many companies are in a licensing grey area now as a result, and I also
wonder how much it really matters in the end.

For example -- I have a side project I built years ago called Tides Near
Me. It's the most popular tides app in the iTunes & Google Play stores, and
also has a decent web presence. I used the MapQuest Nominatim service to
geocode and/or reverse geocode all the global tide stations used in the
app. What would the community have me do? I'm actually curious, let's use
this as a litmus test, what should I do with this database? What do we
want? Personally, because I haven't improved any OSM-relevant data that I'm
not sharing back, I don't see how it would benefit anyone to open this (but
I also wouldn't really care about opening it). What do you think I should
do and why?

-Randy
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