Hi, > It's not like the current Creative Commons license for OSM forbids > commercial use.
This is true but some commercial uses might become un-viable because of the SA license. My standard example is this: Assume you spend half a year making a nice hiking atlas from OSM data, putting a lot of manual work into improving the auto-generated base map. In the process you also collect a lot of data which you contribute to OSM of course (although the license wouldn't even force you to!). Your final product is a printed book that you want to sell for 50$. Which you may - as long as it is CC-BY-SA. This again means that any publisher from, say, China can take your atlas, create a thousand cheap copies of it, and sell them for $19.99. This situation will make it very difficult for you to find a publisher for your original work. So, business models that work around consulting or services in connection with OSM will work, but those built around creating and selling a product less so. I view this as unfortunate because I think that if someone uses his own time and labor to create something on top of OSM then he should be entitled to revenues coming from his time and labor. Of course it is hard to tell which part of the revenue is due to *his* time and labor and which is due to the OSM material that he has built on, and the proportions will surely vary across projects. But still - currently we basically say you own *nothing* of what you create on top of OSM, or more precisely, you do own a part of it but you're not allowed to exercise rights that would normally come with ownership. The new license that is being discussed will probably address this problem by trying to constrain the viral aspect to the data or the database, and granting you more freedom to exercise rights on a non-database derived product. Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
