Frederik Ramm wrote on 16/09/2010 08:37:
Hi,While the International context is interesting, from a practical map usage point of view, it is the national perspective that is important. The OS data is high quality and gives access to information, such as rivers and streams which are difficult to plot accurately, if only due to land access issues. The trouble with licensing is that to be legal, you need to be pedantic about the data usage. There are two issues - the identified derived data and the unidentified data. Once there is a single item of data that is (or at least can be shown to be) derived from OS, then the terms of usage of the OS apply. Tagging helps identify admitted examples, but the reality is that anyone editing with the OS map as a background is checking his edits and therefore deriving data from the OS data. Once a way has been tagged as OS derived, I would presume that it is derived in perpetuity, even if substantially edited. So back to the original poster, in principle if the database is to be clean of OS data to avoid being incompatible, then two things need to happen - * any way that has at any time been tagged as derived from OS needs to be deleted from the database. (Not necessarily trivial if people remove the source tags). * any way that has at any time been derived from the OS and could be shown to be derived by reasonable means would need also to be removed. Ethically, there is a third point of derived data that would be difficult to prove came from OS but was actually derived but was not marked as such - arguably every edit that was done with the OS map in place as a background for confirming GPS traces and the like. Considering the second point, that is nearly impossible, so to be legally correct, the only way to deal with that would be to reset the database to the point before the data was available. Therefore it is dangerous to suggest that the OS data represents the threat of a minor loss. I'd suggest to be legally correct, it represents the threat to the viability of the UK project. So I would assume that the OS data is a major jeopardy. It is not a trivial issue to remove. It is a trivial issue to agree a wording of licence that explicitly acknowledges the OS data and requires derived works to be licensed in a compatible manner. From a UK perspective, the OS data represents an important resource funded by the people of Britain which has been granted back to the people of Britain on that understanding, and on the understanding that it is an enabling resource for unimagined derived products (which is surely the OSM motivation too). For the sake of the licensing requirement which is essentially the most trivial to comply with - the acknowledgement that some of the information has been derived from the OS - the principled argument from the International perspective makes little sense from a UK perspective (IMHO!!!). Spenny |
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