[OSM-talk] OSMHQ (Open Street Map High Quality): Viable Alternative For The National Map Corps
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Wed Sep 3 20:25:37 BST 2008
Hi,
Sunburned Surveyor wrote:
> I think the viral part of the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike
> license is the "Share Alike" part.
Correct.
> You can't take OSM, build something
> on top of it, without sharing the improvements with others.
The current license requires you to make the end product (not necesarily
the "improvements" altogehter) available under the CC-BY-SA license as
well, IF you decide to publish the end product. Say you add a lot of
data to your private copy to make a nice T-Shirt print of the map later;
the T-Shirt print will have to be CC-BY-SA; the data you added is
untouched (of course anyone could read your extra data from the T-Shirt
and enter it into OSM).
> In that
> sense the OSM license "infects" the improvements and requires them to
> be released under the same license. I think the viral language in the
> GPL is a little stronger, however. If the share alike clause was viral
> in that sense any map containing any OSM data at all would have to be
> released under the same license, even if the other map data did not
> come from OSM.
This is the case. If you buy, say, a proprietary dataset containing the
location of gas stations, then plot that on top of an OSM map and
publish the result, the whole result (including the position of gas
stations as readable from the map) has to be CC-BY-SA. You do not have
to publish your raw data about gas stations however, the license only
affects the end product.
All that being said, there are many people in OSM who would actually
prefer a non-viral license (including me). Hope is more or less lost to
get the whole of OSM to adopt a BSD style license, but I hope that we
can at least somehow flag data that comes from PD sources and/or has
only been touched by people like me who assert that everything they
contribute is PD. See this page for details:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Category:Users_whose_contributions_are_in_the_public_domain
You guys in the US have a good base there with the TIGER data; any US
user who makes a modification to anything imported from TIGER and who is
*not* on the above list basically makes that data item un-PD forever, so
I hope to see many of you on that list. One could then one day create
OSM extracts that have all the data untouched by people who want to use
the viral license.
And you are right: This is a topic for legal-talk, and in fact has been
discussed there many times over. I'll cc this post and set a Reply-to
header but I fear it will be removed by the mailing list software.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frederik at remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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