On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 10:32 AM, Joao Neto <joao.p.n...@gmail.com> wrote: > Great points Anthony. Thanks for sharing! > To be honest I think the share-alike aspect of the license is too > restrictive and working against the project. The most successful projects in > the open source / community space all seem to have a very healthy balance > between individual contribution and private contribution/investment. I think > the share-alike requirement is killing the potential for growing a private > ecosystem. In my opinion there aren't that many sustainable business models > in this space where companies can freely share their data. If you do that, > then eventually someone will copy your data and business model. With your > "differentiation factor" gone, you'll be out of business pretty soon.
I think the same could be said of Wikipedia, and in fact there are very few companies successfully making a business model out of taking Wikipedia content. Of course, that doesn't seem to be hurting Wikipedia, which is a project to create a free encyclopedia, not a project to help people make money off their non-free encyclopedias. Likewise, OSM is, or at least was, a project to make a free editable map of the world, not a project to help people make money off their non-free maps of the world. Unlike some in the OSM community I don't think there's anything wrong with you wanting to make a profit off your maps and/or map data. But I also don't think helping you do so is any part of the goal of the OSM project. Fortunately for you OSM is changing to a license which is much more favorable for exploitation by businesses. Ask this question again in a few months when and if the project has adopted the ODbL. _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
