Hi, Anthony wrote: > Or we can just come right out and name names. Google has built a > business around mixing public domain data with its own proprietary > improvements. Cloudmade has build a business around "provid[ing] > professional services around open mapdata". If everyone who improves > map data has to share their improvements (with improvements defined a > way that doesn't include the types of improvements which Cloudmade > makes, namely Produced Works), Google loses, and Cloudmade, at worst, > isn't affected at all.
It's a difficult situation being OSMF chairman, LWG leader, and CloudMade founder at the same time. (I did campaign for no commercial interests to be represented in the OSMF board in the election run-up but, as always, nobody listened...) If Steve were to say "let's go PD", everone would howl: "You're only doing this so that CloudMade can rip us off!" If Steve says "let's go ODbL", he is accused of only doing this because it keeps CloudMade in business by making things more difficult for Google. If Steve were to say "license change? are you stupid? let's remain where we are!" then people will say that he isn't interested in putting OSM on a safe legal footing because CloudMade has arranged themselves with the imperfect situation and he'd rather sacrifice the project's data than change a system that works for CloudMade. So, whichever way he does it it's wrong, isn't it? On a side note, CloudMade would certainly be affected by ODbL; for example, they simplify OSM data for faster rendering, and they pre-compute routing data for faster routing. Both data sets are derived databases used in the making of a produced work, and as such they fall under section 4.6 of the ODbL. CloudMade will either have to make the data available or at least make available an algorithmic description of how this data is created. Having said that, the ability to create non-free rendered maps is certainly something that will appeal to some businesses. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
