On 10 April 2012 09:20, Chris Hill <[email protected]> wrote: > IMHO there never was a problem. OS said they couldn't speak for Royal Mail, > which is fair enough, but it doesn't mean there is an actual problem. > Codepoint Open now features on the data.gov.uk website as something that > uses the Open Government Licence, and a little web app using OSM and > Codepoint Open data is shown there too.
Have you got a link for Code-Point Open being available under the UK Open Government License? If it is indeed available under OGL, then I would agree with you that there isn't a problem. However, certainly for the version you can download from the Ordnance Survey website, the license is not OGL, but OGL plus an additional perpetual attribution requirement [1]. My understanding is that this additional attribution requirement is not compatible with ODbL, and that's why LWG had to get special permission from OS to include things derived from other OS OpenData products in OSM. That permission was granted by OS for everything except Code-Point Open (which they didn't own all the rights for) [2]. OS then said they needed to consult Royal Mail about Code-Point [2]. From the message [3] relayed by Michael Collinson, it's not entirely clear exactly what discussions there were between OS and Royal Mail. But from the wording of [3] I would guess that OS did consult Royal Mail, and Royal Mail refused to to waive the perpetual attribution requirement. This would then leave Code-Point Open incompatible with ODbL. Whatever happened between OS and Royal Mail, [3] seems quite clear that LWG's view is that the license for Code-Point Open is not compatible with ODbL, and thus it can't be added to OSM. So whatever your personal views on the licenses, you shouldn't contribute data derived from Code-Point Open to OSM. If anyone wants to distribute Code-Point Open derived data themselves under ODbL (or a similar license) then that's obviously up to them, but it would be courteous to the OSM community if anyone doing so made LWG's position on the incompatibility of their data clear, to prevent innocent mappers using the (potentially tainted) data to contribute to OSM. Robert. [1] http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/docs/licences/os-opendata-licence.pdf [2] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2011-July/011995.html [3] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2012-January/012688.html -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
