2009/10/12 paul perrin <[email protected]>: > This doesn't add up - free for 'non-commercial' use means you can innovate > all you like with the free data, but if you commercialise your work then you > need to charge a price that covers the cost of your materials.
So, as a (not completely) hypothetical example: suppose I set up a non-profit site to help members of the guiding organisation exchange postcards with other units in the UK. As part of that, I use postcode data to ensure that users get a reasonable spread of locations, and to show a map of where the other units are. As traffic grows, I need to get some income to cover my costs. However, as soon as I start putting adverts on my site, or charging a premium rate for some extra services, I'm a commercial organisation, so have to pay £3700 per year for the data I was previously allowed to use for free? Such a huge step would be impossible to take "organically", so I'd either have to get some funding from somewhere, or give up on postcode-derived features on my little site. Presumably, I'd also need to drop any cached information I had about where users were, if I'd derived that from postcode information. I think the problem is that there's not really a clear line between "commerical" and "non-commercial" in the real world - there's a continuum of organisations. Putting barriers up which make it harder for small projects to grow into full commercial organisations isn't going to be good for anyone, and certainly not for the wider economy. Coming back from the hypothetical, though, I'm thinking of setting up almost exactly such a site, and asking the users to locate their postcodes on openstreetmap to get a bit more crowdsourced postcode data... -- Richard _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
