Hi,
On 22.10.2012 22:12, Alex Barth wrote:
I do hope to come to an agreement within OSM along the lines you just
hashed out, Frederik (while not quite advocating for it):
This really ought to be discussed on legal-talk where there are many
people with a year-long involvement into the finer details of the
license - Cc+Followup there.
Right now we largely don't have functioning municipal
boundaries in OSM. Obviously, any data that is mixed into OSM data
for _powering_ the geocoder would fall under share alike
stipulations.
I'm not sure about this "obviously".
I can imagine situations where someone collects geocoding queries and
OSM's answers and perhaps even records which of the results the user
clicked on afterwards, giving them a distinct advantage over other OSM
users who don't have all that extra data. IIRC, geocoder.ca has proven
that they can build a valuable geocoding database with such techniques.
If we were to make a blanket declaration that geocoding doesn't trigger
share-alike, we'd give that away, we'd allow people to build their own
"improved upon OSM" geocoding databases and sell them on. If we allow
it, then it *will* happen, because there's a commercial gain to be had.
We would even open the door to services where someone geocodes with OSM
and then says "wrong result? just move the marker to the right position
on this map", and keeps the corrections to himself, in a separate
"corrections" database.
I haven't thought this through enough to actually say which of the
"unwanted use cases" are indeed possible even with the current
"substantial" guidelines
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Substantial_-_Guideline)
and which additional "unwanted use cases" would be possible with a
weakened form of those.
We should perhaps not only make a list of "what people would like to do
with geocoding", but a second list of "what we don't want people to do"
(things like I sketched above - build improved database on top of OSM
and market that), then we can maybe check any guidelines we draft
against these points.
You bring up the important problem of properly bounding the geocoding
case. I'm thinking if all that can be extracted from OSM's database
are names and addresses for lat/lon pairs or lat/lon pairs for names
or addresses, it would be arguably impossible or at least
impractically hard to recreate a functioning street network from it
and the extracted data would be a narrow subset of OSM no matter how
many locations are being geocoded. Thoughts?
I'm not sure that "a functioning street network" is the bit that
share-alike intends to protect and the rest is not: This whole
discussion arose from the fact that there is heightened commercial
interest in OSM-based geocoding - that there even seem to be people who
are not interested in a functioning road network at all but who would be
prepared to invest quite a bit of money to "switch2osm" their geocoding.
So it seems that maybe address data is as valuable as the street network
and should have the same level of protection?
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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