I contacted people at NASA asking whether they were planning on releasing their ASTER data under a license that would be suitable for projects like OSM. I quoted them the terms they present upon download which would be problematic:
""" # I agree to redistribute the ASTER GDEM only to individuals within my organization or project of intended use or in response to disasters in support of the GEO Disaster Theme. (Required) # When presenting or publishing ASTER GDEM data, I agree to include "ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA." """ As it turns out the first clause is (apparently) to facilitate tracking of how the data is used and so that they can announce updates, and the second is to ensure proper attribution. I've asked them permission to quote their complete reply but that's basically it. So, what we should do is to author a document (on the wiki?) which clearly explains why such terms which restrict redistribution and fields of endeavor mean that free content projects like OSM can't use the data and will have to keep using SRTM. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk