[Openstreetmap] The bigger picture

[Richard Fairhurst]

Tom wrote:

> On 2/14/06, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I think they'll get produced anyway, and if you loosen the
> restrictions then you just encourage people to go off and do it alone
> without feeding back into the project.  Rather the attempts to profit
> from OSM be tightly coupled to the project than parasitically skimming
> off the top of it.

I'll give a real-life example.

I'd like to produce a complete map of Britain's waterways for my day 
job, which
is as editor of Waterways World magazine. The basic ingredient for this is the
line data for all Britain's canals and rivers, and I'm working on that at
present.

If OSM's ShareAlike just applies to the geodata, then I could think about
including OSM-sourced motorways as a faint background layer to this 
map. I then
contribute all the canal/river line data back to OSM, as required by 
ShareAlike.
OSM gets a free plug in 18,000 homes, and a nice load of new data, at least
partly drawn in work time and donated by the company I work for.

If OSM's ShareAlike applies to the entire finished map, though, I have 
to put a
PDF up somewhere, and licence that as ShareAlike. This means, next month, I'll
see it appear in the other competing magazines. I really can't see my boss
going for that.

So OSM doesn't get the data. Instead, I either buy the motorways from Ordnance
Survey, or just forget about them totally.

In other words, blanket application of ShareAlike makes it _harder_ for
commercial companies to contribute to the project.

You said earlier on:

> Again, this doesn't prohibit people from selling their
> data, just requires them to distribute it under the same terms as the
> OSM data they derived it from.  That sounds totally fair to me - OSM
> gets the benefit too since the derived works could go back into the
> main database.

But you can't feed PDFs, Illustrator files, paper maps or websites back 
into the
OSM database... or am I missing your point? (likewise, that's not a rhetorical
question, it's genuine puzzlement)

cheers
Richard