[OSM-talk] open data

Lars Aronsson lars at aronsson.se
Fri Sep 22 20:15:08 BST 2006


Tom Carden wrote:

> Ahem.  I think "helped Steve to hold on" sounds a bit loaded there,
> Lars.  I don't think it's fair to imply that he wants to hold onto

You're right.  I don't want to put load or blame on Steve, I only 
want to drop it from myself.  I could have phrased this better.

An interesting scenario is this: If OSMF suddenly were to say 
"we've changed our minds. all our data are now in the public 
domain", would this be interpreted as similar to what CDDB did?

CDDB, the music compact disc database, now known as Gracenote, is 
eternally impopular because of the way they "stole" the 
community-collected data, went commercial, and made it proprietary 
in March 2001.  Read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB

In the scenario I sketch here, the similarity is that the central 
instance asserts authority over the community's data.  The 
difference is that it goes PD rather than proprietary.

You might say that such a move is impossible because the OSMF 
doesn't own copyright to the data, since that is held by the 
individual contributors.  But if you begin by asserting that this 
kind of data cannot be copyrighted, the motion becomes far easier.


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




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