Hi,
On 10/20/2012 09:59 AM, Toby Murray wrote:
The discussion was about the fact that some companies are very afraid
of share-alike licenses and it is preventing them from using our data
to its fullest potential.
There are several sides to this.
Of course the share-alike license prevents companies from using our data
to the same potential as a hypothetical PD counterpart (or a
licensed-for-money competitor); excluding some kinds of
use-without-sharing-back is the reason for a share-alike license and was
desired by a large majority of the stakeholders.
On the other hand, the license does not have to be feared, and some
users might actually let their fear of share-alike shy away from some
totally legal uses of OSM.
There is some uncertainty about when exactly
the share-alike clause is activated. One specific example that was
mentioned: If you use OSM data to geocode a user's address, does the
user database then have to be shared?
No, but the database of locations, which might let others guess who your
users are.
That's apparently how the
lawyers tend to read it but in my mind this would be silly. We have no
use for a company's user database even if it were possible to release
it without breaking every privacy law on the books.
I agree that we have little use for that database of locations but I
think that it is crystal clear this is a "derived" database. The only
way to not require share-alike for that would be - as Richard has
recently mentioned on legal-talk, where this discussion should be held
-, to define any amount of geocoded locations to be "insubstantial".
However that would raise the question - could you not, by mass-geocoding
every single address on every single street - re-create our whole street
network? That could hardly be insubstantial then.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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