OJ W wrote: > Could you expand that answer? Removing cartography from the scope > of OSM's license would seem to deserve a better explanation than a > dismissal like that.
Sure. A printed map; an online routing service (like, say, YOURS, OpenRoutingService, or CloudMade routing); and a dedicated satnav device all perform the same function: they communicate a subset of map data to the user in an understandable, friendly way. Under CC-BY-SA, as I'm sure you know, a printed map can only be licensed as copyleft. The cartographer therefore no longer has exclusive rights to their "added value" (colours, selection of data to include, and so on), which are clearly apparent from the map. These can be trivially copied. Under CC-BY-SA, a routing service does not have to be licensed as copyleft.[1] The author of the routing service does not have to disclose their "added value" (weightings for different types of road, any transformations applied to the data, etc.). These cannot be trivially copied: to do so would require reverse-engineering a near-infinite set of requests and you'd probably be banned for DoSing before that. ;) It's an artefact of the fact we're currently using a "creative works" licence - the copyleft therefore applies to creative works. ODbL is a database licence, therefore the copyleft applies to data. ODbL is not interested either in art or in computer source code. The really good thing is that OSM therefore gets [2] the "added value", the data, in computer-readable form from both - something CC-BY-SA doesn't offer. You could, of course, argue the opposite of ODbL - that the routing service author should have to publish their added value in full, just as the cartographer does - and indeed Lutz.horn on the wiki has said exactly that. I think that would be a very honest position to take, and if you're the kind of guy who believes everything should be Free in the RMS sense, I respect your opinion though it's obviously not one I share. But I don't see how arguing for full disclosure by cartographers, but not by routing system authors, is tenable. I think Rob Myers summed it up well on legal-talk: "It's a pragmatic step to ensure that what users of free maps actually need (free maps generated using quality geodata) isn't denied by ensuring that the subject of copyleft in the wild is something else (low-resolution maps rendered from that data)." cheers Richard [1] and indeed several aren't, e.g. CloudMade routing, OpenRouteService [2] subject to the "bug" Frederik and I raised on odc-discuss yesterday, and Dave raised on legal-talk today -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/License-plan-tp22245532p22310036.html Sent from the OpenStreetMap - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
