[Osmf-talk] my views on the ODbL
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Sat Dec 5 13:32:28 UTC 2009
Hi,
80n wrote:
> Both sets of data will be available. There will probably be two files:
> odbl-planet.osm and ccbysa-planet.osm each containing different data.
>
> You may be able to technically combine the two databases to create a
> single map, but I don't think you would be able to publish it as the two
> licenses are incompatible. I think the most you can expect is that the
> two maps could be viewed as separate layers.
>
> Can anyone with a deeper understanding of the new license comment on
> what would happen if you mixed the two datasets?
My reading is that it would be perfectly legal to load the ccbysa-planet
and the odbl-planet both into separate tables on our tile server and
then configure Mapnik rendering in a way that creates tiles from them.
These tiles would then have to by CC-BY-SA licensed.
I see this as a technical challenge more than a legal one. What we would
really need for this is not a ccbysa-planet but a
ccbysa-not-relicensed-planet, i.e. a file that contains all data that
has not been relicensed. This could then be mixed (in a "collective
rather than derivative database" situation) with ODbL data.
Of course there will me myriad technical problems like what happens if
you have a relation parts of which are in one file and parts in another.
In order not to trigger ODbL on the CC-BY-SA content you must refrain
from mixing data into a derivative database, it may only be mixed into
non-database products...
If the OSMF members agree to proceed with the license change, then it
would make sense to start thinking about these issues, e.g. whether we
want to include non-relicensed data in our tiles and how we are going to
do that.
If we do that, then this may lead to some minor forking of the project.
Not something terribly bad but technically complex. Imagine there's a
whole village somewhere remote, the data for which has not been
relicensed. The village appears on the map through some "we also use old
data for rendering" magic. A road in that village is renamed, and I read
about this in the paper. I cannot copy the whole village, or even just
that one road, over to the current ODbL dataset because that would be a
CC-BY-SA violation. If there was some chance to point my JOSM to the old
dataset and make the change, even if that change is then CC-BY-SA, I
would probably do that. I could imagine that we'd be seeing something
like this - people not forking in order to set up a competing project,
but people operating forked infrastructure in order to allow the interim
maintenance of non-relicensed data, until such time it has been resurveyed.
The only way to avoid this would probably be orchestrating a massive
rejection drive against non-relicensed data, including deliberately
leaving out the data from our map tiles as if it didn't exist. That
would force people to resurvey missing data more quickly rather than
having the old stuff stick around, but it could also alienate some.
Bye
Frederik
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