What will be the likely scenario for the USA, where most of the data is derived from the TIGER database (land attributes such as roads, buildings, rivers, and lakes; political areas such as states and counties; and statistical areas such as census tracts)? By US law, this data is in and must remain in the public domain. If all OSM data derived from TIGER data must be removed or rendered read-only, this won't leave much editable data in the USA.
-- John F. Eldredge -- [email protected] "Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria -----Original Message----- From: Frederik Ramm <[email protected]> Date: Sun, 06 Dec 2009 22:39:13 To: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason<[email protected]> Cc: <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Opinion poll about the new licence Odbl 1.0 Hi, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: > On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 20:36, Liz <[email protected]> wrote: >> For Australians it means the loss of the coastline, most of which has been >> re- >> edited from government data, and major rivers like the Murray > > If someone presents me with a boolean "Do you allow relicensing under > the ODbL" I'll have to say no because some of my edits are derived > from CC-BY-SA data I don't have permission to license (and I probably > can't even recall what all of it is). > > Which'll mean nuking >50% of all the data in Iceland most of which > I've touched at some point. First, I would appreciate if people could stop talking about "nuking" data. The absolute worst case, where data cannot be re-licensed into ODbL because the original contributor is dead, does not agree, cannot be reached, or cannot be bothered to read our proposal, is this: The non-relicensed data will sit in some kind of separate, possibly read-only server, from where it can be accessed, just like now, under the terms of CC-BY-SA. This server may or may not be made available by OSMF but it will certainly exist, and OSMF has already said that a full history dump will be provided. We will, in all likelihood, be rendering tiles that display the old data alongside the new data in a fashion largely indiscernible from today's maps. These map tiles will have to be CC-BY-SA licensed (because part of them comes from CC-BY-SA sources) but that's fine with us. (OSMF has not made a statement, and probably neither a decision, about whether or not the osm.org tileserver will serve such mixed renderings but if that server doesn't then you can be sure others will fill the need.) We might even - and again, this is something outside of OSMF's control and can be set up by any interested group in the project - allow limited write access to the old CC-BY-SA database, so that when things are eventually relicensed or resurveyed, they can be removed from the old data set to avoid rendering conflicts. So for map rendering, the damage will be, I shall say, minimal. More effort for rendering, yes, but the same good maps that we already have. It will be more difficult for routing engines or other users of our data because combining CC-BY-SA and ODbL data in a database is not possible except in fringe situations where you can get away with having a "collective" database. Also, of course, editing will be more difficult because you have the legacy data. But even here it is thinkable to have editors that will download old and new data, and maybe display the old data in a "greyed out" version or so, indicating that editing is only possible on the new data. (There's neither technical nor legal reason to disallow editing on the old data, but we do want to have an incentive for people to ultimately make the switch I think. Also we have to be careful not to copy data from one dataset to another.) But this is the worst case. I firmly believe that it will be possible to come to terms with many contributors, even if they disagree with ODbL at the moment, or if they are government bodies which act at turtle speed. It will take some effort and may not always work, but I see no reason to be so pessimistic about this. (It will be necessary for OSMF to rein in those in it's ranks who think that this can be achieved by insulting anyone who is against ODbL, but I trust this will automatically come as the organisation matures.) Also, there will surely be a fine-grained approach to edits. Just because you have touched something in Iceland and cannot make the switch to ODbL, one can still retrieve the version from before you touched it, and use that. Better than nothing. (In cases like yours, I think one should really make an effort to determine which of your edits are "tainted" by external CC-BY-SA sources. I think it would be ok to get this 90% right, it doesn't have to be absolutely correct - if a few CC-BY-SA items slip through, or if a few non-CC-BY-SA items get dropped, the damage isn't that big.) Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
