Hello from Germany!
I'm the head of www.wetterpool.de - a free weather data project for
germany and europe. We want to be the first project with free data
(hundreds of private weather stations). Therefore we need some special
help with licenses. As an active mapper on OSM I came across ODbL and
other licenses but we are unsure which one to use or if it could be
necessary to use a bundle of licenses.
So mainly I want to ask if someone can help us with licenses and
judicial subjects.
Our problems and facts are the following:
- we have a database with hundreds of weather stations sending us free
data (currently without a certain license)
- most contributors would agree introducing a license like ODbL
- our data could be free but we need a license that saves the data from
commercial use without "feedback" for the community and contributors
- ODbL produces a lot of questions. Some of them already have been
answered by ourselves, but others are difficult to answer clearly.
So at the end we need a license which grants free data, but protects
them from misusage. Data should be free for all, but copys, reductions
or improvements of data must become public again - always and without
any exceptions. We want to give our data away to support science and so
on but we want to avoid governmental or private weather services from
takeing our data and producing commercial products which can not be used
by the community. So eventually we want something like "take our data,
as long as everybody can take your derived data or products using this
data".
In our opinion ODbL is not clear enough. As we understood, data is free,
as long as a user of that data offers a way to download his "database".
But what happens with created products and commercial improvements? Many
of our users are afraid of products or databases which must not be
shared with the community. There are some more examples of kinda fiddly
circumstances:
- An unimportant user takes our database, changes it and creates a small
app at his homepage. He asks himself how to provide the new database
with low server ressources, but a lot of people downloading his data
- A commercial service takes our data without change. Are they allowed
to sell it without sharing? That would be horrible for our project!
- A commercial service takes out data and changes it. They produce a
derivated map. We would prefer to make him provide his new database. If
he uses 2 databases and creates the map "on the fly" we want, that this
data has to be published too.
- What happens, if someone does not use a database? He just downloads
the data and displays it somewhere. No database used. Horrible too!
If you aks me ODbL is great because it covers international aspects and
so on but we are not sure about using it for our project aims and our
prefered restrictions on data usage.
Can you help us? We really need help to realize that project. It's also
planned to use OSM maps in the future to provide a worldwide map with
our data.
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