interesting... In another life (the one that pays the bills) I work with a team, several in fact, that collects and manages biodiversity 'facts' (hundreds of millions of them: this species of plant or animal was found here, then, etc. - hence the lurking fascination with OSM). This large national and international community of professional 'fact collectors' (see for example, www.gbif.org) wants to make their facts and the visualization of these facts freely available and they are leaning towards the Creative Commons and the related Science Commons licenses.
Putting words into their mouths, I think the argument would be that the decision-making involved in selection, storage, management and display of these fact is indeed a creative act, even though the facts themselves aren't. A blank screen magically comes alive - a map with dots, lines, symbols, colours and most importantly, communicated meaning. Sure smells like creativity to me... I wonder if the Renaissance cartographers, or any cartographers for that matter, would regard their work as not creative? A well rendered informative and accurate map is a beautiful thing. They don't just happen; someone must have created them. It is the feel-good creativity of OSMers seeking, finding and documenting facts and putting them in maps for public good that has made it pretty difficult to leave this forum... :) I will continue to keep an eye on the open database model - in some circumstances it might be just the right tool for the job. jim On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 2:45 PM, James Livingston <doc...@mac.com> wrote: > On 28/02/2009, at 12:17 PM, Jim Croft wrote: > >> Out of curiosity, would one of the Creative Commons >> (http://creativecommons.org/) licenses be able to provide >> thefunctionality and the flexibility we might need? > > Basically, no - what is why the Open Database Licence is being worked > on. Essentially the problem is that while Creative Commons is fine for > creative works, OSM pretty much a collection of facts rather than a > creative work. > > I haven't looked into all the details, but I believe that ODbL tries > to use "database copyright" when such a concept exists in a particular > countries legal system and other mechanisms when it doesn't. > > > Cheers, > James Livingston > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-au mailing list > Talk-au@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au > -- _________________ Jim Croft ~ jim.cr...@gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 "Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality." - Joseph Conrad, author (1857-1924) "I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant." - attributed to Robert McCloskey, US State Department spokesman _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au