[Openstreetmap] The bigger picture

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemeD.net
Tue Feb 14 15:35:29 GMT 2006


Quoting Tom Carden <tom at tom-carden.co.uk>:

> So you're just replacing 'work' in the current license* with
> 'geodata'?  How does that help?  (Not being sarcastic or rhetorical
> there - I'm not clear on the difference).

Ok.

"Geodata" is: there's a road from lat/long 51.13425,0.2342345 to
51.34652,0.13245.* It's called Albert Street. It's one-way, there's a pavement
for pedestrians to use, and it's part of National Cycle Network route 71. (And
any other amount of key/value stuff you want.) This is the essence of OSM.

A "map" is: here's a black line on a piece of paper (or a JPEG, or an
Illustrator file), depicting Albert Street. Because it's one way, we've put
some little arrows along the side of it. (2pt stroke, solid arrowhead, 100% C
50% M 0% Y 0% K). We've written "Albert Street" along it in 3pt Myriad Pro
Semibold. We're not producing a walking or a cycling map, so we've ignored the
stuff about the pavement and the NCN route.

The map is clearly a derived work from the geodata.

So why does it help to replace "work" with "geodata"? Because, to quote the
first sentence on the wiki, "OpenStreetMap is a project aimed squarely at
creating and providing free geographic data". We're not trying to create a
cartographic reference library full of different styles of maps, just as long
as the geodata coverage expands through the goodness of sharealike (as 
you say,
"set the data free and all that").

Three of the reasons why this clarification is important.

One is the suggestion I made about producing lovely-looking maps. By 
clarifying
ShareAlike in this way, we get easy funding for OSM without any loss to the
project aims. (And yes, I'm volunteering to do the work.)

The second is something that was mentioned earlier (can't remember by who,
sorry). It'd be great to do a Google Maps-compatible API using OSM data - a
really superb advert for free geodata. At present, if we were to do that, the
entire contents of any site using that API could be deemed a derivative work
under CC-BY-SA; so you've got to make sure that every single piece of data on
your site can be relicenced under ShareAlike, even assuming you want 
to. And it
wouldn't be so great to have a "free" API that you could actually use in fewer
situations than the proprietary one.

And the third is that, by removing limitations on the ways in which 
OSM-derived
maps can appear, we make it more likely that these maps will be produced. The
other part of CC-BY-SA is Attribution, and I would love to see printed maps
springing up here, there and everywhere with little OSM logos, saying "go to
openstreetmap.org to find out how to help".

What I'm suggesting isn't anything new. In the full CC-BY-SA Legal Code, they
already have an exemption like this: the concept of a Collective Work. This
says, broadly, that if you incorporate it into an
encyclopaedia/anthology/whatnot, then SA only applies to this one 
entry. CC's a
literary licence, not a geodata one: we need the geodata equivalent.

cheers
Richard

* All geodata in this example derived by hitting random keys :)





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