Hi,

Emilie Laffray wrote:
While I am not a legal expert, I will try to answer that one.
Companies can already make money from OpenStreetMap: there are plenty of examples around (Skobbler, Cloudmade, Geofabrik, etc....). There is nothing preventing a company from using the data. However, they are bound to make their data available.

People often claim that "I do not want somebody to make money from OSM and give nothing back."

I would like to point out that there are a number of perfectly legal ways, today, of making money from OSM and giving nothing back. A very simple example would be a large organisation with many sales representatives, where the organisation issues OSM maps to the sales reps instead of buying from Garmin. That can easily give them five-digit yearly savings, and nothing is "given back".

They can also start building something on top of OSM, e.g. add their own POIs to the map, or hack the TomTom map file format to be able to generate TomTom maps from OSM - all without "giving back".

You can, today, legally, couple OSM data with software you sell ("buy AutoNav 1.0 with free OSM data"). Of course the data can be copied under CC-BY-SA but why would anybody copy it since anyone who has the software to read it also has the data. Then you offer a data update, but sadly (due to added features) that update only works with AutoNav 1.1 which you have to buy for 5$ extra. Of course the update is free but...

And, of course, if you are in a country where CC-BY-SA doesn't work then you can just completely ignore CC-BY-SA and produce dreived works to your heart's content without giving anything to anybody.

Bye
Frederik

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