[Openstreetmap] The bigger picture

[Lars Aronsson]

Tom Carden wrote:

> Could the £10 you suggest be split between OpenStreetMap and a 
> commercial satellite/aerial photography company perhaps, with 
> the latter providing pay-for access to imagery that would allow 
> you to sanity-check the OSM data?
> [...]
> Note that I'm not talking about restricting access to the API, 
> although that again is something that could be a pay-for service 
> for commercial use.  Basically, so long as people are always 
> entitled to access OSM's raw data for their own personal use,

This whole discussion is a provocation!  Unless the list owner 
makes it clear that this line of thinking is impossible, I'm on my 
way out of here.  Some people obviously want to build a new 
Ordnance Survey, and if there is any risk that OSM is going to be 
*their* platform, then I want to make sure that I didn't 
contribute to their effort.

When I spent this summer, fall, and winter drawing maps for OSM it 
was my intention that these maps should be available for all, for 
free, for ever, for any purpose (commercial or not), under the 
CC-SA license.  If OSM is going to become the kind of proprietary 
map publisher that Tom suggests, it can under no circumstances 
claim any rights to the maps I made.  You are free to charge for 
the map data, the same way that Red Hat and SuSE charge for Linux, 
but you are not free to restrict people to use and share the data 
for free.  You cannot even dual license the data (the MySQL way), 
because you don't own the copyright in the first place.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se