[OSM-talk] OSM layer into Adobe Illustrator?

Roozbeh Pournader roozbeh at gmail.com
Mon Feb 26 14:32:41 GMT 2007


On 2/26/07, Barnett, Phillip <Phillip.Barnett at itn.co.uk> wrote:
> I wasn't asking OSM to CHANGE their license. I know we have a license -
> my complaints were that nobody could clarify for me exactly what it
> meant in practise, so I ended up not being able to use it for fear of
> transgressing the license (in particular, the suggestion by various
> people that I needed to credit _individual_ contributors - which I had
> no way of contacting)

Please!

A project like OSM cannot give you legal advice (for gratis or not).
OSM's data has a license which tells about all these things, and you
know where can the exact text be found. You should not have contacted
the "talk" mailing list of such a project for such licensing info.
Instead, you should have talked to your own organization's lawyer
about using material available under a public license (CC-BY-SA, in
this case).

I know several organizations that use or extend free software/open
source software in various ways. They don't contact the original
authors of the software each time they want to use it for whatever.
Instead, they check the license the authors have specified, see if it
suits them fine. They will then contact the authors if they still wish
to use the software but the license is not good for them. And guess
what, the authors rarely grant such a license. They usually say sorry,
either follow the license or use something else. Do they provide legal
advice? Rarely. Do they go over your exact usage scenario and tell if
they think you are following their license properly? Rarely.

If you want to know what a license means exaclty, contact a lawyer who
knows about licenses and can interpret it for you. It's as simple as
that!

Good luck,
Roozbeh




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