On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 10:10:34AM +0100, Dair Grant wrote: > Simon Ward wrote: > > > I¹d rather those providing the PostGIS data be obliged to provide their > > source (planet dumps, whatever) to the same people. > ... > > The example was convoluted, but I hope it illustrates my point that mere > > translation should not be excluded from being counted as a derived > > database. > > If you're obligated to provide the source to your translation, providing > access to the translation itself seems pointless.
Stop! I’m talking about someone who’s already providing a translation for whatever reason. They should provide the source to those they provide their work to as if it was a derived work. One reason for providing the translation in the first place is for convenience. Something that uses geodata expects a particular format that’s not OSM format, for example. > One difference between OSM usage and free software is that a great many uses > of OSM will be a one way process. Sure, it’s often a one way process, that’s why you would prefer the source be made available. > What's left might be useful for reconstructing OSM in an emergency, but the > planet dump that went into the process would be much more helpful. Which you may not have access to, and whoever distributed the derived DB to you should be obligated to provide. > If the data is just a translation from OSM (or some data literally derived > from it, like a precalculated routing table/simplified graph/etc) then > making that accessible is pointless. Only in the simple scenario that OSM will always be available to provide the source. You can’t guarantee that. The one way you can do that is to get the distributor to also distribute their source. You have contact with them, otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to get the derived work, and they can get you the source, otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to derive from it. > If that can't be done then, yes, those changes should be published in a form > that could be used by OSM. It shouldn’t be about specifically contributing back to OSM. Ivan has already pointed out this fails the desert island and dissident tests used as rules of thumb for the Debian Free Software Guidelines. You take the data. You distribute it (modified or not). There shouldn’t have to be a requirement to explicitly contribute back to OSM, but you should be obligated to provide the preferred form for modification and reuse (that is most likely the OSM format DB dump in OSM’s case). That way anybody who has access to your modified work gets the freedoms to examine, use, modify and redistribute it themselves. In many cases this would mean the work is available to be incorporated into OSM, but if the user is on the desert island, they still have freedoms given. The problem is primarily to do with having data people are free to use, and not necessarily getting contributions back into OSM itself. > I don't see that necessarily has to be via the translated database though. A > j.osm patch, or a modified planet file, would be easier to create and easier > to merge in (if they turned out to be something we wanted). They should be obligated to provide the source, not necessarily their own translated format. Again you’re concentrating on explicitly contributing back to OSM which would be very nice, but not always directly possible or helpful to reuse of the data. > If the translation doesn't improve the OSM data, and you get the source > planet dump with the translation, what would you do with the translation > that you couldn't do better with the planet dump? Use it with the tools only written to use the translated format? Of course, if we assumed these were free too (clearly a wrong assumption) then the problem may not exist. Lacking fully free software or fully free data, one or the other existing is better than nothing. > If the translation does improve the OSM data, but you get the source planet > dump plus the improvements as a .osm file, requiring the translation itself > be a public format seems excessive if the goal is to improve/protect OSM. My goal is free data. OSM is one way to achieve it, because that’s one of its aims (or I thought it was, am I wrong?), not the goal itself. The term “public” is being used far too much, and I think it should be avoided. I don’t require anything to be “public”, just that the people who receive the data get the same freedoms as those that they received it from. -- A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.—John Gall
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