[OSM-talk] RFC: Import of OpenGeoDB to OSM

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> I was going to ask the same thing... googling pops up a german wikipedia 
> link...  Frederik mind helping?

The matter had been discussed on talk-de; they call themselves a
"free" database and have their data listed as "Public Domain" on
Sourceforge so at least from their point of view incorporation into
OSM should not pose a problem. (They used to be LGPL but removed that
around 2006.)

As to where their data comes from - we don't really know but the bulk
of the data has been around since 2003 and that's definitely
pre-Google Maps. The main author, Thomas Mack, claims to have compiled
the bulk from various free sources which he explicitly checked for
"PD-ability", and says he sometimes used commercial maps to
cross-check individual data items but never copied from them.

So I'd say the data is clean, or at least clean enough ;-)

Readers of German might want to check this posting by Thomas Mack in
which he responds to a question by Joerg Ostertag (who would have
thought of that!) and says something about the sources:

http://lists.phpbar.de/pipermail/opengeodb/2006-September/003552.html

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'