Hi, Dair Grant wrote: > Perhaps it's not worth treating the "translating the Database to a > less-expressive form" case as different to any other modification case. > > But it does seem a bit like jumping through hoops, when it would be simpler > to say "I truncated all coordinates to 4 decimal places" or even "the DD is > a subset of the information in version X of the D, and here's a copy of > that".
I think this bit need serious work as it might, if handled carelessly, stifle creativity. Say you take a planet dump or excerpt, make a shapefile, drop it into your favourite GIS tool, run some kind of rendering or filtering on it, maybe arrive at an SVG or PNG file, load it up in a graphics editor, make more changes, and after a number of steps arrive at something that looks cool on a T-shirt (like e.g. http://www.remote.org/frederik/tmp/shirt.png). The typical long night design job. It is clear that you have made at least one derived database, and it is clear that you had some kind of "experience" at the end. Somewhere in between the database ceased to exist but this is something that is not part of your creative process, not something you even think about as you go back and forth between PostGIS, renderers, GIS software, bitmap editor, whatever. You might not even remember how you achieved a certain result. You are also very likely to throw away all intermediate results once your T-shirt design is sent to the printer as they are now irrelevant. If I am not mistaken, then the new proposed license, as it stands, would require you to (a) identify the final "derived database" in the processing chain and (b) save it and make it available to everyone who gets a T-shirt. Apart from this being pretty much useless to anybody (yes, Simon, I know that there may arise a situation where the world has been destroyed and the only thing that remains is the CD-ROM that was distributed with the T-Shirt from which we can now salvage a bit of OSM... but let's stick to those scenarios with a higher probability of entry for the time being!), it will burden the creative process with administrative decisions, apart from the fact that not everybody who designs a T-Shirt necessarily has the means to host a database for downloading. (By the way, *for how long* would I have to make a database available after using it in a one-off gig like the T-shirt?) This is a very murky area. We cannot even say that you only have to share additions or improvements to the database - because what is an improvement? If someone re-aligns a street in his local database copy based on precise measurements he has access to, then I want this improvement shared. If sets up his local copy of Potlach (the tool of choice for such operations!) and randomly moves 1.000 Central London nodes while urinating on a pile of Ordnance Survey maps and becomes a famous perforance artist then we don't *really* require him sharing his "improvement" even though it surely elevated OSM from the banal into the artistic Olymp with him. But if we say you have to basically share everything you do to the database (as I understand the license to require now) then we make it unneccessarily hard for people to work with the data. I'm tempted to say that if the data base is modified using some kind of original data input - from your GPS, from your company archives, from your Grandma's local knowledge - then ist has to be shared; if, on the other hand, you only apply algorithms or noise to it, then keep it an just tell us that your work is based on the so-and-so planet file. But I'm sure this, too, doesn't catch everything. We must do everything we can to avoid making things more difficult for people than they are now (they are difficult enough already). Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
