[Talk-ca] Canadian Municipal Open Data Licenses

[Richard Weait]

Dear all,

I've sent a note to a couple of Canadian municipalities about getting
permission to use the open data they publish in OpenStreetMap.  I'll
let you know the responses.  If I haven't said anything about this in
a few weeks, please remind me.

The history of ad-hoc licenses and terms of use, the relatively new
state of international data law and the international scope of OSM
make it hard to "just accept" their ad-hoc licenses. Or to judge them
as compatible.  I hope that those publishers will say the equivalent
of, "yes, we want you to include our municipal data in OSM", and then
we can rely upon that.

Presuming that permission is granted, the usual import guidelines will
still apply.  :-)  But having more sources is better than having fewer
sources. (Unless you have to choose among multiple disagreeing
sources.)

I've added their attribution messages to the wiki[1] so that they can
see how we'll credit them.

Best regards,
Richard

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contributors#Canadian_Municipalities