[Talk-ca] Vancouver campus data

[Richard Weait]

On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 8:52 AM, Gregory <nomoregrapes at googlemail.com> wrote:

> I've been taught by OSM to be doubly sure on the license of data, and it
> probably differs from usual use because: it's out of academia; it can be
> used commercially; the attribution to UBC PlantOps is not always visual. I
> had also already sent an e-mail asking the Records Manager.

Well, you (or I or any other OSM contributor) can't speak on behalf of
OSM and the OSM Foundation.  We can't accept a contract on behalf of
the Foundation, etc.  So there is nothing that you can do to make this
okay, without help or some additional steps.

1) So, you can ask the data donor to agree to contribute their data
under CC-BY-SA v2.0 the current OSM license.  You should also tell
them that OSM will transition to ODbL v1.0 in the near future and they
should agree to that as well.  If they agree to that, get it in
writing, copy it to legal at osmfoundation.org, make a note on the
wiki[1] as well.  Then follow the rest of the import guidelines [2]
and check that the data is actually of high enough quality to be worth
contributing.

2) get them to publish their data under the PDDL[3].  This is a public
domain equivalent and PDDL data can be imported to OSM if the data
meets the rest of the import guidelines.

3) or, consider their license, and present it to
legal at osmfoundation.org for consideration.  Try to point out the good
and bad points of the license and the potential data contribution for
the OSMF, they really do have better things to do that to read every
last bizarre home-grown license from contributors who don't want to
participate in OSM.  Donors expecting anything beyond mention on the
Attribution page are probably expecting too much.  Especially small
donors.

To review, each of us can discuss, guide, and encourage individual
donors.  With experience we can even suggest what terms are more or
less likely to be accepted by OSMF.  We can't decide what OSMF will
accept and we can't accept terms on behalf of OSMF.

Hope this doesn't dampen your enthusiasm.  Just take all the steps and
ask for help when you need it, perhaps at legal-talk or import lists.
Keep traffic to legal at osmfoundation.org to a minimum, they're only a
few volunteers.

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Attribution
[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import_guidelines
[3] http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/