[OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement

[Ed Avis]

Richard Fairhurst <richard <at> systemed.net> writes:

>For them, it's not
>about the law one way or another: it's about reputation risk.

Yes, and the fact that if they did try to claim they could copy the OSM map
data, then their own maps would equally well be copyable.  Which would be great
for us, and bad for them.

>So Google, Tele Atlas and Navteq are, in my view, largely irrelevant to the
>licence discussion.

(except in so far as we may be able to influence them to contribute to OSM
or to free their own maps - which unfortunately doesn't appear to be much)
 
>It's everyone else who we have to worry about. In the last couple of months,
>I've personally noticed a national railway company, a charity with a
>turnover of >£100m, a vast firm of couriers, a magazine publisher, a book
>publisher, all infringing our requirements/requests for attribution and
>share-alike.

What's not clear is how the ODbL+DbCL licence would help this situation.
It would at least straightforwardly permit the publishing of map tiles without
any attribution or share-alike requirement, so we wouldn't have the work of
trying to track down and contact such infringers.  That is a bit of an odd
reason to switch to it, though, if the supposed purpose is to stop people
misusing the data.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>