On Sep 3, 2008, at 11:51 AM, Sunburned Surveyor wrote: > The "public domain versus Creative Commons" debate sounds similar to > the GPL versus LGPL debate that goes on in the open source software > development world. The licensing of geodata is an area of great > interest to me, and something I would like to learn more about, > especially as it applies to OSM.
You may be interested to read the following post that discusses the existing and alternative licenses with regards to OSM: http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262 There is also a wiki page that links to the proposed license(s) and also contains a bit of criticism of even the proposed changed license: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Open_Data_License I found this response to be helpful regarding the "GPL vs. BSD" debate in the context of OSM: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2008-May/000983.html > What can't you do with OSM data under the Creative Commons license > that you couldn't do with data in the Public Domain? To me it seems > like the only two (2) major differences are sharing your improvements > to the data and attributing the work of OSM. That's basically it, > correct? Other posters have shared most of the worst pitfalls with the current CC-SA license. The proposed license does clarify a great deal (though some concerns regarding commercial use remain) but it is still only *proposed* and there is no estimate as to when or how it will be enacted as far as I know. thanks, -natevw _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk