[Openstreetmap] The bigger picture

[Immanuel Scholz]

Hi,

> 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.

The original discussion was about changing the license for OSM. If any
contributor does not accept a license change (as example you and me) the
license change is rejected. Simple that. :)


Remember, that it is problematic if someone want to ask only some of the
contributors for their acceptance of any other license, extract their
contributions only and publish this data without the other contributor's
data.

This is because he has to make sure, that the contributions he uses are
free of any "derived" work from people who don't accept the new license.
This may be possible only in a regional area of the data base.


> 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.

I think that is the thing Tom and the others spoke of.

Since your map data is released under CC-SA, any map provider can use this
data and sell it. Anybody may take the whole database and provide a
restricted, paid-only access to the data (which may, as example be powered
by very good hardware and so be very quick compared to the current
server).

But what neither Tom nor anybody can do is take the data and republish it
under anything else than CC-SA without permission of anybody who has
contributed.


I am very confident, that if the current OSM server would only allow some
commercial access, an other server mirror with free access would be set up
in no time ;-)

Ciao, Imi.