[osm-professional] Import License Guidelines

[Serge Wroclawski]

In the US we're going to be soliciting municipalities and other
organizations for data to be imported.

One of the challenges of this request has been the variations in
licenses and general confusion by GIS professionals and administrators
on what exactly terms the data can be given in.

In order to address this, I'm generally suggesting two tacts. The
first is that we will spell out general licensing terms which are
usable for OpenStreetMap. The other is that we should be encouraging
municipalities and organizations to provide their data to us under the
most permissive licenses as possible.

To try to make the general licensing terms more concrete, I've begun
writing a document on import guidelines that could be used by a GIS
professional who is unaware of OpenStreetMap, or maybe of Free/Open
Source software- something where the terms are clearly spelled out.
I've borrowed the format and wording from the Open Source Definition
and put it on the wiki for discussion:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DraftOSMImportGuidelines


I plan on revising the wording as time goes on, as well as provide
some other guidelines than license (such as preferred data formats). I
will send it to the imports list as well, but since I want the
audience of this document to be non-OSMers, I wanted to discuss it
here first.

- Serge