[OSM-talk] open data

[Richard Fairhurst]

On 20 Sep 2006, at 20:01, Tom Chance wrote:

> I'm always very dubious of people claiming their boss, or company X, 
> wouldn't
> be able to turn a profit using a copyleft license. Unless somebody has 
> a
> comprehensive survey of the cartography industry showing that 
> commissions and
> contracts are rubbish, and continued ownership of custom maps is 
> essential,
> I'd lean towards saying "tough luck" to those who want to take the OSM
> community's work and cash out.

"Commissions and contracts" are great for some things. They enable 
limited-interest, high-value works. They're really good if you're a 
services company like Logica, and Government comes waving a £1m cheque 
at you to say "do some custom geo analysis that only we will find 
useful". Whether the end result of that is ShareAlike, or not, matters 
to no-one - it's a one-off commission, IP is owned by the commissioner, 
and the end result will be freely downloadble from some .gov.uk website 
anyway.

But that doesn't work for consumer-level stuff. If you spend months 
drawing a lovely walking map of the Lake District - and turning raw OSM 
data into a Harveys-quality map _would_ take a hell of a lot of 
artistic effort - you would sell precisely three copies before someone 
scanned it and uploaded it to myfunkywalkingsite.com.

I don't like rewarding the big corporate guys at the expense of the 
artisan in this way. I think it's contra to what open data should stand 
for.

And believe me, the people who would benefit from OSM data right now 
are freelance cartographers and small companies like Harveys, Stirling 
Surveys, GEOprojects [1] - not monoliths like Ordnance Survey, Navteq 
or Tele-Atlas. For the big guys, the effort of integrating this small 
amount of data into their systems, with all the attendant quality 
assurance issues, simply isn't worth it. (Note that the Society of 
Cartographers, which largely represents academia and the small guys, 
has been  interested in and supportive of OSM. Compare with the lack of 
interest from the British Cartographic Society, which is more geared 
towards the big players.)

So what you call "cashing out", I'd describe as "helping cartographers 
earn a living by applying their skills to OSM data, in the same way 
that programmers can earn a living by applying their skills to Linux 
installation, distribution and support". Neither takes away from the 
core pool of free information - indeed, to restate, a more 
closely-defined ShareAlike licence could actually increase OSM's data 
pool. But YMMV.

cheers
Richard
free mapper and cartographer :)

[1] Google some of their maps, they're all lovely.