[OSM-talk] Licence of Facebook's derived road datasets? ODbL?

[Yuri Astrakhan]

Stevea, I think this discussion mixes two topics, as Martin pointed out:
* I want to be credited for my work (i.e. you couldn't have done it without
me, just say so)
* I want to control what you do with the results of my work (i.e. you must
not kill baby seals using the map I created)

The first one is mostly a social construct, and most of the time we are ok
if someone just says "came from OSM" - because then we know others will
want to find out more, and join the project, growing the community, and
essentially giving back to what you believe in. E.g. if i donate $5 to the
grow a tree (Arbor Day) foundation, my money is mostly useless unless you
also donate to them.

The second is different. It's a legal weapon, something we can use when our
sole existence is at stake. We will have to spend money and time defending
it. When OSM started, some people didn't want Google to benefit from the
volunteer efforts without giving back (see point #1). So they went into all
sorts of legal mambo jumbo to prevent such unholy use.  They were
successful - Google hasn't used the data directly.  It would be very hard
to say if this did more damage than good to the OSM project itself (rather
than if we used CC0 license), but it has been done.

Yet, forcing public domain data to be distributed under a more restrictive
license just because we want to be nitpicky about the letter of the license
achieves neither of the above goals.  Rather, it scares users away.  I
seriously doubt of the validity of this legal theory, but even if it is
correct, it is not in OSMs best interest to pursue such restriction. It
does not gain us anything, and causes a lot of collateral PR damage in the
process.

On Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 6:29 PM stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:

> I don't know.  I've expressed my opinion(s) on the matter, and believe the
> LWG should chime in with "an" (the?) answer.
>
> SteveA
> California
>
> > On Nov 14, 2019, at 3:27 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > sent from a phone
> >
> >> On 15. Nov 2019, at 00:19, stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> But the "ultimate test" of "can the new work be made without OSM data?"
> remains a good one, in my opinion, because then, the author can be told,
> "well, then, go do so, please, otherwise offer us attribution of some sort"
> (whether legally required, or not).
> >
> >
> > if you distribute a dataset and say: all roads but not those in
> OpenStreetMap, isn’t this already attribution? The question is whether
> you’d want to force them to distribute under ODbL rather than MIT (and
> maybe what the downstream users have to attribute).
> >
> > Cheers Martin
>
>
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