<[email protected]> writes: > On that page, it states Dakota County encourages public use of this > GIS data. “The County Board of Commissioners adopted a policy of free > and open GIS data, in collaboration with the other six metropolitan > counties in the Twin Cities. More information on this initiative is > available from MetroGIS. “ The page that in links to is the hub for > all this licensing stuff. In the documents it defines Open as “no > legal agreements or other conditional encumbrances required to access > the data” and “no constrain on the use of the data once acquired by > the user”. > > Do they have to explicitly say CT/ODbl on the website or does it > suffice they link to the policy created by all counties in the metro > that says, free take it, no contraints?
There is no need to refer to CT/ODbL. What's necessary is clear permission to use the data under terms that are acceptable. (I'm just a random member of the imports list, and if the consensus is that this license is good enough, I won't object.) I think we are talking about: https://www.co.dakota.mn.us/HomeProperty/MappingServices/GISData and the text at the bottom includes If you transmit or provide the GIS Data (or any portion of it) to another user, you must provide a copy of this disclaimer and the accompanying metadata for this dataset to the user. This qualifies as open data; it's logically similar to attribution requirements in various software licenses, and those are not disqualified from being Free (FSF) or Open Source (OSI). But software is generally a bunch of files, and carrying such license text is trivial. In the OSM case, there's a large vector database with no facility for disclaimers (except on the web site), and data is routinely extracted. OSM doesn't want to impose these notice requirements on users of the database. It may be that adding this disclaimer to the set at https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright is sufficient. But OSM cannot provide copies of a county's disclaimer to all people who access OSM data that might include some of that data. Going to the metrogis site, and finding the Dakota County resolution, I see that it says: NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, That the Dakota County Board of Commissioners hereby authorizes the Office of GIS to publish its public geospatial data on its website in a commonly recognized and easily produced form, available for download by anyone at no cost, subject to accepting the terms of the data disclaimer GIS data usage agreement; and and the "data disclaimer GIS usage agreement". So the metrogis Free and Open notion is not really the issue; it's the requirement to provide a copy of the disclaimer and metadata. OSM's usage is of course within the broad spirit of this; the metadata should be in the chagngeset comments, and that's accessible to those who want to look it up. For what it's worth, in Massachusetts the terms are generally "public domain, with attribution requested", which has been ok.
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