[OSM-talk] OSM icons

[Ulf Lamping]

Igor Brejc schrieb:
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 2:39 AM, Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping at web.de 
> <mailto:ulf.lamping at web.de>> wrote:
>
>     Would be nice if Kosmos would use the
>     same icons for the same things as JOSM does.
>
>     P.S: I still consider Kosmos to be closed source, so be careful to
>     include any none PD icons into Kosmos!
>
> Kosmos distribution itself does not contain any map icons, it 
> downloads images from URLs you specify in rendering rules. 
Ah, ok, then Kosmos shouldn't have a direct licensing issue with it. 
JOSM includes these icons in it's jar, so I just assumed that Kosmos is 
doing it the same way.
> Currently icons which are used all come from OSM wiki, so I guess it 
> shouldn't be a problem to synchronize with JOSM. 
Yes, would be nice to synchronize the icons with JOSM.

Your way with using URLs has a drawback, as it adds a dependency to the 
OSM Wiki. When the Wiki is down (or the URL moves or so) the rendering 
will missing the icons. However, might be a hypothetical issue ;-)
> I don't know what are licensing constraints when you download images 
> from internet and display them on maps. 
Copyright constraints? You as the program author should have an answer 
if someone asks you: "I'm using the Kosmos defaults to render an OSM map 
of XY. As Kosmos is licensed under GPL/Apache/BSD/... license, and OSM 
is CC-by-SA-2.0 what is the license of the resulting map?".

To my understanding, the resulting map will be CC-by-SA-2.0. That means 
that you shouldn't use any license incompatible icons here.
> I guess it's the matter for the user, not the program itself.
Obviously, it's not very practical if every user would have to find the 
icons on the internet to draw a common map. So Kosmos should come with 
defaults, so it can draw all required icons onto the maps (whatever such 
a "default set" of icons may include or not is up to you). As Kosmos is 
working with OSM data directly (and not using slippymap output), as a 
user I would expect that the icons are coming with the program and 
therefore are under the programs license or are specially noted if they 
have a different license.

In contrast to this, if a user wants to extend this default and add his 
own icons (e.g. because he wants to draw a special purpose map), he's 
obviously responsible about copyright issues of such "private icons" 
himself.
>
> I will publish the Kosmos source as I promised. It will come together 
> with the next release, probably within days.
Great!

Regards, ULFL