Hi, Matt Amos wrote: > this is the crux of the question. the ODbL makes no distinction > between lat/lon data, ID data, or any other sort of data. so the > question then becomes; if i'm using some data from an ODbL database > and incorporating that into my database, do i have to release all of > my database, or just the bits of it which came from or were derived > from the ODbL database?
Let's look at the reason why we have this whole viral license, shall we? (I'm taking off my "this is all stupid and we should do PD" hat for a moment and act as if I were a share-aliker.) The idea behind this is that we don't want to give anything to people which they then make proprietary - the worst case being that one day OSM ceases to exist and only some proprietary copy remains. The license is there to ensure that OSM data remains free. But a site that *only* takes OSM IDs in order to link to them does not create anything of their own. If OSM one day ceases to exist then the OSM IDs stored in that site become worthless. They only store pointers into our database, they don't make a derived product. (If I tell you to download a film and skip to 6'32 because that's where the action is, am I creating a "derived work" of that film?) You are right in saying that by the letter of the license, an id is data just like anything else. But the spirit surely affects only *useful* data? Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
