On 11/07/2011, at 12:16 PM, Steve Coast wrote: > On Jul 8, 2011, at 5:16 PM, Anthony wrote: >> >> >> I'm not talking about trivial transformations. I'm talking about >> downloading a few terabytes of LIDAR information, an OSM planet file, >> a bunch of shapefiles containing parcel shapes, and a bunch of data on >> parcel usage from the county property appraisers, and creating tiles >> from it. > > My understanding is all you need to ship is the ruby script which does all > that. You don't need to ship all those things you mention if they too are > available. I am not a lawyer, of course, but that's my understanding.
I think the interesting but is the "if they too are available" part. If the data that needs to be used in conjunction with the code is hosted by a third party, is that good enough? >From what I know the general consensus on the GPL with it's three year term is >that you need to keep a copy of everything yourself, in case someone asks for >the source in 2 1/2 years time and upstream has vanished. GPLv3 clarifies this >explicitly with "Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you >remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to >satisfy these requirements". Most people who build binaries packages of GPL'd >code who aren't Linux distribution ignore this, assuming that there will be at >least one copy floating around the Internet and that no-one is going to sue >them anyway, Back to our situation, if you don't keep a copy of all that data yourself, what happens if the original source of the disappears? I'd think you would need to stop distributing the Produced Work, or you'd have issues when someone took you up on the offer since part of what is needed is no longer available. If you need to make the Database available for any period longer than the Produced Work was available, you may not have the "stop distributing" option. If you've just doing something small you might ignore it as most people distributing the personally-built linux packages do, but I'd be wary if I was a company doing it. Of course, if you're a company you should ask a actual lawyer and not me :) -- James _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
