[OSM-talk] Partnership between OSM and local government?

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Tue Sep 21 12:12:54 BST 2010


Hi,

Jukka Rahkonen wrote:
> There can be a little problem if municipalities are also selling 
> their geodata. For sure municipalities can use dual license for the 
> original data 

This is a complex topic in itself; some governments might say "you can 
have the data, it is for noncommercial purposes only but you said you 
are noncommercial...?" and then you have to explain that yes, we are 
noncommercial but the data we collect can be used commercially...

If you get something in writing, the best thing to get is something 
where they allow you to use their data "for publication as part of 
OpenStreetMap". That would then include the current and any future 
license. Do not under any circumstances accept data that is released 
"under CC-BY-SA" as this is a dead-end that will require re-negotiation 
soon.

> but what happens if they want to update their own data 
> with OSM user contributions? Would the whole updated dataset become 
> share alike as well?

Under both the current and the new license, yes, that would make their 
own data share-alike. What you can do, however, is collect errors in 
their data on a separate wiki page where you clearly say that the wiki 
page content is meant to be given to them to improve their data - then 
mappers who find major bugs can add these to the wiki page and the city 
council gets a nice list afterwards. We did that once when we got a lot 
of official data:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue/Strassen_NRW/Unstimmigkeiten

Bye
Frederik





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