[OSM-talk] Attribution guideline status update

Christoph Hormann osm at imagico.de
Fri Aug 9 17:26:40 UTC 2019


On Friday 09 August 2019, Kathleen Lu wrote:
> You are right that we hope to avoid disputes by setting out
> reasonable guidelines, but if OSMF sets out guidelines that are
> unreasonable and not tied to the language of the licence, then no
> one, either users of the data or judges, will listen to OSMF, and,
> under the law, rightly so.

The key point is that it is fine if the guidelines deviate from the 
license on the side of caution, i.e. as Richard puts it: requiring 
something that is not in the license.  That is possibly suboptimal but 
there is no serious harm to err on the side of caution.  No data user 
could sue the OSMF for in the guidelines recommending something that is 
not required by the license.  OTOH if the guidelines recommend 
something that is not allowed by the license that is a serious problem, 
it defeats the whole purpose of the guideline and endangers the 
credibility of the OSMF both with mappers and data users.

In the current form i have the impression that the guideline draft tries 
to state the most lenient interpretation of the license w.r.t. 
attribution that is imaginable which is not obviously wrong (and in 
case of the 50 percent rule i think it goes beyond that - this is 
obviously not compatible with the license from my point of view).  I 
find this kind of - well - reckless.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/



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