Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> I'm a good guy, I'd hope; I've given years of my life to OSM, and
> contributed a lot to the community (hardcore JOSM users may see fit to
> disagree ;) ). Despite that OSM offers nothing to me, because CC-BY-SA's
> share-alike clause is defined in relation to creative works, not to data.
> That means my particular niche (hand-drawn, highly specialised cartography,
> requiring days of work for a small set of maps) works fine with Ordnance
> Survey OpenData, but not with OSM. If I were someone writing routing
> software, whose endeavour is not caught within the arbitrary application of
> CC-BY-SA share-alike to OSM, I'm sure I'd feel differently.
I see that the ODbL fits your particular use case nicely. But as you
acknowledge, things look different for people with other use cases. I
expect that I'm one of those people whose favourite use cases won't
benefit from ODbL - quite the opposite, in fact.
My personal niche in the realm of OSM products are 3D models. My vision
is to build applications that let people explore models of the world and
create products such as virtual panoramas, animations, or even simulator
game scenarios, with no more than a few clicks. Users of these
applications would not be limited to downloading pre-made models from a
server and looking at them, but should be able to configure model
generation as they see fit and have it instantly performed by their
computer.
If I'm not mistaken, this use case highlights several of the ODbL's
downsides:
* Complexity: This is particularly bad when non-specialists create
produced works (e.g. screenshots), and the tool they use creates
derivative databases in the process.
* Unclear distinction between database and produced work: Illustrated by
3D models, which are yet another "it depends" case.
* Skewed balance between effort for sharing databases and sharing
products: A database of a virtual environment can be much larger and
harder to publish than the short "flying over my hometown" Youtube clip
produced from that database.
* Unclear "method of making the alterations" alternative: This seems
hard to apply to GUI-centred software. Strictly speaking, this would
also force users of the application from my use case example to ensure
continued availability of the SRTM database ("additional Contents") and
the program (part of the "algorithm") as long as they want to continue
publication of their produced work.
> You said "CC-BY-SA is also a license that few current mappers should hate so
> much that they cannot stand to be part of a project that uses it". For the
> past three years I've stayed here partly in the hope that we'll move to
> ODbL, and partly out of inertia because OS OpenData wasn't available three
> years ago. The day that it's decided that we're staying with CC-BY-SA is the
> day I quit the project.
I hope that you could still be convinced to accept a dual licensing
solution that makes the database available under both ODbL and CC-BY-SA?
If your goal is to eliminate legal barriers that make it hard for you to
use OSM data the way you want, then I can understand your position - I'm
doing the same thing right now, except for a different use case and
therefore with different requirements.
Trying to take existing options away from friendly data users, though -
and an ODbL-only solution would involve that - is something that I can
neither truly understand nor support.
-- Tobias Knerr
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