Brian Butterworth wrote:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/17/ordnance-survey-maps-online
"The online maps would be free to all, including commercial users who,
previously, had to acquire expensive and restrictive licences at £5,000
per usage, a fee many entrepreneurs felt was too high."
About time too.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/17/ordnance-survey-maps-online>
Questions remain.
For example - freely available data that can be used commercially can
mean a lot of things - some of which are a lot more useful than others.
Is this freely distributable vector data, with a license like cc-by-sa?
Or is it a virtual map, like google, where you only get to see tiles,
and cannot legally derive data from them, or copy them for use in other
situations.
The first allows more or less any use.
The second might not allow for example:
Taking the data, and rendering a cycling map deemphasiseing motorways,
and emphasising cyclepaths.
Crowdsourcing traffic data, and using it in a free routing application.
Adding housenumbers to a copy of the map.
...
The OS already claims that you cannot draw a line on an OS map, without
that line being derived from the OS map, and requiring a license to show
that line to others.
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