Hi, [email protected] wrote: > We need to state that we are not working for yahoo and why people > should prefer to license thier work to OSM over other sites.
No. Such we-are-better-than-them reasoning will only give you the kind of negative feedback you have just received. I agree that it would be nice to have some kind of standard message for GMM contributors that explains our project and the possibility of dual licensing. However, please always bear in mind that Google have the same rights vis a vis our contributors, so if you do start to poach in their realm, test yourself: Will you react calmly if Google send messages to every OSM contributor asking them to dual-license their data? Only if you can honestly answer yes should you proceed. If you do prepare such a standard letter, be sure to highlight the positives and not the negatives: "Dear so-and-so, I see you have added a tremendous amount of data to Google Map Maker which I found very impressive. I am involved with a non-profit project that does something similar to Google Map Maker. It is called OpenStreetMap. We try to be soemthing like a Wikipedia for maps - everyone can contribute, and everyone can use our data for any purpose they like (drawing different kinds of maps, offering various services, programming computer games - whatever). I, and indeed the whole OpenStreetMap project, would indeed be very interested to be able to use the data that you gave to Google Map Maker for OpenStreetMap as well. Since OpenStreetMap follows very strict intellectual property rules, we do not simply copy data from anywhere - we always ask the original rights owner for permission. Since you are the original rights owner of the data you contributed to Google Map Maker, will you allow me to incorporate your data in OpenStreetMap as well? There would be no additional work involved for you. You can find more about the OSM project here ... and all our data is licensed under CC-BY-SA which you can read more about here ..." Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
