One of the main requirements of compliance with ODbL [1] is set out in
Section 4.6. As yet there are no community guidelines on how OSM / OSMF
interprets this section.
There seem to be at least three areas where guidelines might be necessary:
A) The term "offer" as used in the first paragraph of section 4.6 "You
must also offer to recipients ". I would have thought this means that
whenever you publicly use a Derivative Database or a Produced Work from a
Derivative Database then you must instantly comply with the remainder of
section 4.6. I may have misunderstood Frederick, but I infer from his
comment "....so in effect if someone ever asks you......" [2] that he
believes you only have to comply with the requirements of section 4.6 when
asked.
B) The first para of section 4.6 states "You must also offer ..... in a
machine readable form". What do we believe "machine readable form" means?
For instance if I produce a printed map, is it OK to have printed
instructions on how to produce the derivative database, on the basis that an
OCR program can read the printed instructions, and it is thus machine
readable?
C) In section 4.6(b) what does the "OR" relate to. It could mean
(i) "A file containing all of the alterations made to the Database" OR " the
method of making the alterations to the Database (such as an
algorithm)...."; ie a file or the method
(ii) A file containing "all of the alterations made to the Database" OR
"the method of making the alterations to the Database (such as an
algorithm)..." ie a file which contains all the alterations OR a file which
contains the method.
I realise that some on this list may think I'm being picky, that I'm looking
for an insignificant comma here or there, but the fact is that if we do not
know how to interpret the ODbL then how will we answer when others ask us
how to interpret it?
Regards
David
[1] http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/
[2]
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2011-June/006272.html
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