[OSM-talk] Calling all bulk importers

James Livingston lists at sunsetutopia.com
Sat Jun 26 03:10:42 BST 2010


On 17/06/2010, at 2:21 AM, Mike Collinson wrote:
> If you have been involved in bulk import of data from third-parties, may I ask you to check that this is on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue .
> 
> Why?  Now we have final versions of everything, the License Working Group is checking compatibility with the proposed change to the Open Database License. We are aware that in some cases the donor's permission will need to asked. We like to leave you as much time as possible to do that and to be prepared to assist you if needed.  There is a new support page here.

I'm going to update the page with some of the data imports that have been done in Australia, most of the ones from government sources being CC-BY (not -SA). As far as I'm aware the conditions of CC-BY should be met by being ODbL, so the licensing wouldn't be a problem, however I'm wondering about the contributor-terms bit.


If I recall correctly, there was discussion that bulk imports could be exempted from the contributor terms - for example AND isn't going to let us arbitrarily re-license their data, so we'd have to exempt that if we wanted to keep it. We're trading off the usefulness of the data for being beholden to the company if we want to re-license in the future.

How does a decision about whether the tradeoff is worth it, and hence gets exempted from the contributor terms, get made? Presumably AND data would get one, but my personal edits wouldn't be worth the tradeoff. We're getting more Australian government data coming along, so what should we be doing to either know that it can be exempted or that we shouldn't import it?

-- 
James "Doc" Livingston



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