[OSM-talk] I don't want companies stealing OSM data that I contribute!

[Emilie Laffray]

On 19 August 2010 11:07, Valent Turkovic <valent.turkovic at gmail.com> wrote:

> AFAIK with new Contributor Terms [1] all data entered into OSM can be
> taken by some company, closed and they could create a product made profit
> on it.
>
> Yes or no? Please just answer this for start.
>
> I have no problem with companies making a profit, just go ahead and do it.
>
> I have a problem with companies that would like to take data, add some of
> their own and not release it, and prohibit making derivative works from
> data that is based on OSM.
>
> If this is true then there needs to be a fork in this project as soon as
> possible.
>
> Sorry for the tone of this message.
>
> [1] http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Contributor_Terms
>
>
Hello,

While I am not a legal expert, I will try to answer that one.
Companies can already make money from OpenStreetMap: there are plenty of
examples around (Skobbler, Cloudmade, Geofabrik, etc....). There is nothing
preventing a company from using the data. However, they are bound to make
their data available.
With the new contributor terms, nothing changes. One of the major difference
though is that you grant your rights to the foundation. This is something
that many open source projects do like GCC (the Free Software Foundation
owns the rights, and therefore decides about GPL licenses) and Apache (The
Apache foundation owns the rights http://www.apache.org/licenses/ and
decides the licence). Rights assignement is common in the Open Source world
whether used by copyleft people or more attribution license. I don't think
that the Apache or the Free Software Foundation are evil in themselves ....
Your data will be using the ODbL, which is a share alike and attribution
license, which means that effectively that a company cannot extract data and
close the map like with CC-BY-SA.
This is a very quick summary and you are more than welcome to go to the
Legal Mailing list to discuss this.

Emilie Laffray
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