[OSM-talk] Explaining to NASA why the ASTER data should be freely licensed

[Tyler]

Ævar, Thanks for trying to get clarification. Despite my disagreeing that
there is any real restriction on the data that affects its use in OSM,
clarification and explicit permission is always a good thing.

This should have been cross-posted to legal, probably. And let me preface it
all with IANAL... Yet.

Martin:

> What about derived data? SRTM is used to generate hillshades and contour
> lines for example. ASTER data would be good for that too. Do they have some
> less strict terms about distributing such derived data (like requiring only
> attribution), or is their policy for it the same?


I take it to mean that you can re-distribute derived data, that would be the
"project of intended use" part. They have that in there so that they can
mitigate the number of sources of the ASTER, so that there's not a bunch of
different ASTER Jun 2009 datasets all saying they're the same thing on a
bunch of different University servers free to the public.

Jeff:

> That clause seems very similar to the BSD advertising clause (and
> is problematic for the same reasons)
>

I assume you mean "When presenting or publishing ASTER GDEM data, I agree to
include
'ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA.'" That's pretty standard
attribution stuff. Which we should want to encourage. Being able to find the
source is probably sufficient (so on a printed map you could say "for a list
of all the sources see www.ReallyAwesomeVolcanoMap.com/sources"), but also
doesn't appear to be a required agreement (it doesn't have the "required",
which leads me to believe it is optional).

If there were a more standard way to get attribution data on the slippymap
(a link: view all attributed sources in this extent) then OSM would probably
be fine, and 3rd parties attributing data correctly is the 3rd party's
responsibility. Immutable historical attribution would also be cool so that
once all the roads from TIGER are correct and totally different there is
still historical attribution data. The attribution mess has been what's
stopped me from using a lot of available State data. Which has no
restrictions as long as there is attribution. And attribution is such a
cluster with OSM data right now that I just don't really want to deal with
it, there's lots to do elsewhere.

The BSD argument was that there would be a spiraling out of control "This
product was derived from this product was derived from this product was
derived from..." a better restriction would have been. "When presenting or
publishing ASTER GDEM data, I agree to provide attribution to METI and
NASA." Which would allow for more options on how to give the attribution.
But like I said, that seems optional to me.

Finally, if someone is planning on doing any sort of stuff with the ASTER
GDEMs in the US, there's higher resolution data available from USGS, 3m in
some cases, so use that instead.

-Tyler
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