[OSM-talk] OSM icons

[Igor Brejc]

Ulf Lamping wrote:
>
> 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 ;-)
Well that's true to a point, but since Kosmos downloads the icon only 
once and then stores it in a cache on disk, I don't think it's really a 
drawback in practice. And the URL could be anything, not just OSM wiki - 
even local resource.
>> 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.
Well the thing is that there aren't any "defaults" in Kosmos as such, 
just a sample project with sample OSM data (for which the license is 
indicated) and sample rendering rules. And I could just switch the 
project to download the rules from OSM wiki 
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Category:Kosmos_rules). Or I 
could publish Kosmos without any sample project. The philosophy behind 
Kosmos is to use shared internet resources as much as possible since I 
wanted to make a wiki-like experience in drawing maps. That's why I 
hesitate to include any "default" icons with it.
My idea was to provide a tool for drawing maps which targets the OSM 
community and not the general public (well at least not for now). So I 
guess certain aspects of it which seem impractical to a non-OSM user are 
(hopefully) not such a problem for an OSM user. This also applies to 
licensing issues - I expect OSM users to respect any copyrights.

Regards,
Igor

-- 
http://igorbrejc.net