I am a former National Map Corps volunteer that has now started to work on OSM. After I posted some ideas on improving the quality of OSM data collection someone suggested that it might be best to allow former National Map Corps members to keep their mapping efforts separate. In this way their data would remain in the public domain and wouldn't fall under the CC Attribution Share Alike License.
The "public domain versus Creative Commons" debate sounds similar to the GPL versus LGPL debate that goes on in the open source software development world. The licensing of geodata is an area of great interest to me, and something I would like to learn more about, especially as it applies to OSM. So here is my first question: What can't you do with OSM data under the Creative Commons license that you couldn't do with data in the Public Domain? To me it seems like the only two (2) major differences are sharing your improvements to the data and attributing the work of OSM. That's basically it, correct? It's not like the current Creative Commons license for OSM forbids commercial use. So the only organizations that would benefit from mapping data in the public domain would be organizations that can't share data improvements because of security or competition concerns, or those that don't want to attribute OSM as a source. Is that correct? Thanks for helping me understand. The Sunburned Surveyor _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
