[OSM-talk] License

[Robert (Jamie) Munro]

Lester Caine wrote:
> Nic Roets wrote:
>> My 2 cents :
>>
>> To me it makes no difference weather I contribute to a CC / GPL
>> project, or weather I contribute to a PD project with a good
>> non-profit orginization (NPO) behind it :
>>
>> If someone then sells a relicensed version of my PD work, that's fine
>> because, in the internet era, his clients will be just one or two
>> websearches away from discovering the true magnitude of his
>> contribution.
> 
> If only that was the case :(
> You obviously have not heard about the current case relating to a 
> company selling reworked PD material as their own work and trying to 
> extract licence fees from the people who actually created it !
> http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/index.html
> If the company win, then the licence covering such little projects as 
> Perl are not worth the disk space they are stored on.
> 
> So lets take care that a commercial hijack does not take place here!

That's an interesting case, but it mostly refers to patents, not
copyright and I don't see how it's relevant here.

Does anyone actually object to what I am proposing? I.e. OSM foundation
have a statement like this one from BBC News (just change "BBC News" to
"OSM foundation"):

   In contributing to BBC News you agree to grant us a royalty-free,
   non-exclusive licence to publish and otherwise use the material
   in any way that we want, and in any media worldwide.

   [snip stuff about foreign broadcast partners]

   It's important to note, however, that you still own the copyright
   to everything you contribute to BBC News ...

Also see http://www.bbc.co.uk/terms/ paragraph 9, "Contributions to
bbc.co.uk".

Lots of other websites have similar agreements.

Back to the real issue: Does anyone mind their data being used to derive
public domain UK postcodes?

I suppose, if we get a download by user feature on OSM, something could
be added to npemaps.org that lets users sign up and agree to their OSM
contribs being mirrored. While this would work, it would be silly.

Robert (Jamie) Munro

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