On 31 May 2009, at 15:49, Dan Brickley wrote:
On 31/5/09 11:41, SteveC wrote:
On 31 May 2009, at 07:10, Marc Wick wrote:
There are fundamental differences between source code and data.
Share-alike code does not prevent you from building complex
applications, whereas share-alike data is a show stopper for
anything
not absolutely trivial.
"..., OSM doesn't even let you do mashups." [1]
I understand that OdbL is trying to address and alleviate some of
these issues. Unfortunately I fear that I am not going to understand
'kafkaesque' legalese and I prefer licenses that I can understand
without having to consult a lawyer. Maybe somebody wants to take the
opportunity and explain in a few words how OdbL is supposed to work?
I said the process was kafkaesque, not the license itself. It
always is,
look at the GPLv3 process.
The ODbL looks a bit like CC-BY-SA for data, except that if you make
something with the data (say, a printed map) then that 'produced
work'
can be licensed however you like so long as you don't reverse
engineer
the data back from that.
Who is "you" in this last phrase? If I (Dan) make a lovely map, and
publish PDF, GIF, JPEG and SVG versions of it online, that's OK? But
if the SVG version had fancy smart markup in it such that it could
be treated programmatically as geographic information, that would be
problematic? Am I (Dan) discouraged from making such an
accessibility-friendly version of my map available? Or are others
simply discouraged from making certain forms of re-use of that data?
(eg. tools for partially sighted users who might want non-visual map
info...)
Let me be clearer - if you reverse engineer the data back out of a
produced work (and by the way SVG _might_ be considered a derived
database rather than a produced work) then that data is under ODbL. So
you can't take the database, make a JPG map, write some software to re-
extract the vectors and then license those how you like, they're still
ODbL.
Best
Steve
_______________________________________________
Geowanking mailing list
[email protected]
http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
