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

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Wed Sep 22 08:00:38 BST 2010


Hi,

David Murn wrote:
> If we cant even convince a mapping group like NearMap of that licence
> certainty, what chance do we have of convincing governments?  

As I said, we *have* successfully convinced governments - or at least 
regional authorities - here in Germany to act as I've written. As I 
said, they are not "licensing their data under an unknown license"; they 
have satisfied themselves that they want to support the aims of OSM and 
that's it. Of course there's a certain amount if insecurity involved but 
governments have to deal with such insecurity all the time.

> Out of interest, has anyone asked these donators what they feel about
> the licence their data is under, being changed?  Maybe they simply did
> some research at the time, found out what licence OSM is under, and
> agreed

No, at least in the recent past people have been advised that there is a 
planned license change (we don't usually go into detail unless of course 
someone requests it - we just say that OSM is committed to free and open 
licenses always). Most of them really don't care unless you present the 
thing as if it were a big deal that could cost them the next election 
(or their pension).

> This method
> may work well for data sources that are public anyway, but if the data
> supplier is licencing their data to other places, they need to ensure
> they dont lose their licenced customers who might choose to use OSM data
> instead of licencing from them.

We don't do pure imports very often; we're more likely to ask for the 
rights to do tracing from their imagery. Since in these cases we create 
something that wasn't there before, we're not competing against a 
product they might be selling.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"



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