Hi Tim, Your app and what you hope to do with it both sound interesting. I hope you are successful. Here's some more information on the open licensing front to consider: - In order to have the legal rights necessary to "open" the material your users contributed, you would likely needed to have gotten a perpetual irrevocable royalty-free license with an unlimited right to sublicense (not limited to only your affiliates, etc), or an assignment, though the latter is far more than needed. - But would use of the photos/text outside of the STAPPZ app be consistent with your users' expectations for their photos/text? If no, then even if you can legally do it you may be passing an unwelcome burden to an open community. - What open license would you provide the photos/text under? CC-BY is a common one for photos, though it is not inherently compatible with ODbL (the license for OSM). There is however a waiver template that makes CC-BY it compatible with ODbL: https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2017/03/17/use-of-cc-by-data/ There is the separate issue with CC-BY that users are supposed to attribute the author. Do your users expect/want their names to be attributed to the photos if they are used outside the App? This may raise data privacy issues a well (especially with GDPR coming into enforcement). - As for open source of the code, you'll have a choice between a permissive license (e.g. MIT, BSD, ISC, DWTFYW) or a copyleft license (e.g. GPL, LGPL) or something in between (MPL, Apache). Permissive licenses make it easier for someone else to take over the project, though there is the possibility that they will take it in a direction you do not like (e.g., build a new version but not open the code to the new version). Copyleft licenses are intended to guard against this, but most companies do not like working with copyleft code and many ban it, so there would be a smaller pool of potential interest. You can see OSMF's current open source projects here: https://github.com/openstreetmap. The licenses currently used are ISC, BSD, DWTFYW, Apache 2.0, and GPL. Best of luck! -Kathleen
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 2:45 PM Tobias Knerr <o...@tobias-knerr.de> wrote: > Hi Tim, > > On 11.05.2018 17:19, Tim Frey wrote: > > Out of this, we consider, heavily, to “open source” the licensing of the > > user created STAPPZ content for the OSM community. In addition, we also > > consider to open source the backend of STAPPZ and the IOS and Android > > app to make a community project out of it. > > I'm going to split this reply into two parts: About the content, and > about the software itself. > > > As for the content, a lot depends on if you can publish the images under > the terms of an open license.¹ That's a legal question, but probably > also a bit of a social one (i.e. would this be in line with what the > creators expected when they shared their images on your app, or would > they be unpleasantly surprised/unhappy about this). > > Assuming the answer is that yes, you can publish them, the next question > is what to do with the images. OSM does not currently have an image > hosting platform, so if we're only talking about contributing the > images, they would need to be donated to a separate platform. > > The obvious recipient for such an image donation would be Wikimedia > Commons, as they're the most popular repository for open-licensed media. > Images on Commons can be linked with OpenStreetMap POIs² and are used as > such by some OSM-based maps. Of course, they're also used by Wikipedia > and its sister projects – notably Wikitravel, which is a crowdsourced > travel guide (although much closer to the traditional book format than > your project). > > A caveat is that such a donation would likely require some manual effort > to filter out lower-quality pictures or duplicates, and to add > meaningful descriptions. Still, assuming the legalities work out, it > seems feasible to donate the images and would be a generous contribution > to the open content ecosystem. > > > Ok, so let's talk about the app and backend a bit. I'm not sure how > familiar you are with OSM's organizational model, but as a rule we're > very decentralized – even core components of OSM are being developed as > mostly independent Open Source projects. For you, this means that even > if there's community interest, any re-use of your project would probably > still start out with _you_ spearheading its development, re-imagining it > as something you believe fits a need of the OSM community, and trying to > gain mindshare in the OSM contributor and developer community. Of > course, this may be at odds with your goal to focus on other projects. > > If this does not discourage you, though, let's consider what needs the > software could serve. I don't have any amazing ideas to offer, but I > could see two basic roles in the OSM ecosystem an image platform might > potentially be able to fill. Broadly speaking: > * Images could be used internally by OSM contributors as a data source > for mapping in addition to sources as aerial imagery and GPS tracks. > * Images could be displayed by user-facing sites and apps alongside OSM > data. (I believe this is what you were getting at with your Google Maps > comparison.) > > The former use case is already partially covered by > Mapillary/OpenStreetCam, so the question is if there's enough of a niche > left for another app. > > The latter seems more ambitious. As I mentioned before, mappers are > currently using tags like image=* with links to external platforms to > add images to OSM POI. Those links can technically point anywhere, > although Wikimedia Commons currently appears to be the most popular > platform to host the images. Inviting users (including non-mappers) to > easily contribute images to a dedicated, OSM-affiliated platform might > be a worthwhile cause. Not sure how well this fits your platform's > existing social features, though. > > Tobias > > > ¹ Typically one of the open CC licenses: CC0, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. > ² Using http://wiki.osm.org/Key:image > or http://wiki.osm.org/Key:wikimedia_commons > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > talk@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk >
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