[OSM-talk] License plan

[Richard Fairhurst]

OJ W wrote:
> Could you expand that answer?  Removing cartography from the scope 
> of OSM's license would seem to deserve a better explanation than a
> dismissal like that.

Sure.

A printed map; an online routing service (like, say, YOURS,
OpenRoutingService, or CloudMade routing); and a dedicated satnav device all
perform the same function: they communicate a subset of map data to the user
in an understandable, friendly way.

Under CC-BY-SA, as I'm sure you know, a printed map can only be licensed as
copyleft. The cartographer therefore no longer has exclusive rights to their
"added value" (colours, selection of data to include, and so on), which are
clearly apparent from the map. These can be trivially copied.

Under CC-BY-SA, a routing service does not have to be licensed as
copyleft.[1] The author of the routing service does not have to disclose
their "added value" (weightings for different types of road, any
transformations applied to the data, etc.). These cannot be trivially
copied: to do so would require reverse-engineering a near-infinite set of
requests and you'd probably be banned for DoSing before that. ;)

It's an artefact of the fact we're currently using a "creative works"
licence - the copyleft therefore applies to creative works. ODbL is a
database licence, therefore the copyleft applies to data. ODbL is not
interested either in art or in computer source code. The really good thing
is that OSM therefore gets [2] the "added value", the data, in
computer-readable form from both - something CC-BY-SA doesn't offer.

You could, of course, argue the opposite of ODbL - that the routing service
author should have to publish their added value in full, just as the
cartographer does - and indeed Lutz.horn on the wiki has said exactly that.
I think that would be a very honest position to take, and if you're the kind
of guy who believes everything should be Free in the RMS sense, I respect
your opinion though it's obviously not one I share. But I don't see how
arguing for full disclosure by cartographers, but not by routing system
authors, is tenable.

I think Rob Myers summed it up well on legal-talk:

"It's a pragmatic step to ensure that what users of free maps actually need
(free maps generated using quality geodata) isn't denied by ensuring that
the subject of copyleft in the wild is something else (low-resolution maps
rendered from that data)."

cheers
Richard

[1] and indeed several aren't, e.g. CloudMade routing, OpenRouteService
[2] subject to the "bug" Frederik and I raised on odc-discuss yesterday, and
Dave raised on legal-talk today
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