[Talk-us] press from SOTM US

Toby Murray toby.murray at gmail.com
Sat Oct 20 07:59:10 GMT 2012


On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 10:48 PM, Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net> wrote:
> we got some. Carl Frantzen of Talking Points Memo asked me about coming to
> SOTM US and
> i urged him to do so. he did and here we are:
>
> http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/openstreetmap-part-1-new-cartographers.php

Not quite sure what the little paragraph about "move away from its
open source roots." is all about. He kind of dropped that in there
like a live hand grenade and then didn't say any more about it.
Apparently this will be in parts 2 and 3. Having been at the session
where I think this statement came from, I can assure everyone that
there was absolutely no talk about moving away from an open license!
:)

The discussion was about the fact that some companies are very afraid
of share-alike licenses and it is preventing them from using our data
to its fullest potential. There is some uncertainty about when exactly
the share-alike clause is activated. One specific example that was
mentioned: If you use OSM data to geocode a user's address, does the
user database then have to be shared? That's apparently how the
lawyers tend to read it but in my mind this would be silly. We have no
use for a company's user database even if it were possible to release
it without breaking every privacy law on the books.

So I think it is mostly just some clarifications that need to be made
and as I understand it, there are people who are probably already
working on this.

Toby



More information about the Talk-us mailing list