Ulf Lamping wrote: > > Your way with using URLs has a drawback, as it adds a dependency to > the OSM Wiki. When the Wiki is down (or the URL moves or so) the > rendering will missing the icons. However, might be a hypothetical > issue ;-) Well that's true to a point, but since Kosmos downloads the icon only once and then stores it in a cache on disk, I don't think it's really a drawback in practice. And the URL could be anything, not just OSM wiki - even local resource. >> I don't know what are licensing constraints when you download images >> from internet and display them on maps. > Copyright constraints? You as the program author should have an answer > if someone asks you: "I'm using the Kosmos defaults to render an OSM > map of XY. As Kosmos is licensed under GPL/Apache/BSD/... license, and > OSM is CC-by-SA-2.0 what is the license of the resulting map?". > > To my understanding, the resulting map will be CC-by-SA-2.0. That > means that you shouldn't use any license incompatible icons here. >> I guess it's the matter for the user, not the program itself. > Obviously, it's not very practical if every user would have to find > the icons on the internet to draw a common map. So Kosmos should come > with defaults, so it can draw all required icons onto the maps > (whatever such a "default set" of icons may include or not is up to > you). As Kosmos is working with OSM data directly (and not using > slippymap output), as a user I would expect that the icons are coming > with the program and therefore are under the programs license or are > specially noted if they have a different license. > > In contrast to this, if a user wants to extend this default and add > his own icons (e.g. because he wants to draw a special purpose map), > he's obviously responsible about copyright issues of such "private > icons" himself. Well the thing is that there aren't any "defaults" in Kosmos as such, just a sample project with sample OSM data (for which the license is indicated) and sample rendering rules. And I could just switch the project to download the rules from OSM wiki (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Category:Kosmos_rules). Or I could publish Kosmos without any sample project. The philosophy behind Kosmos is to use shared internet resources as much as possible since I wanted to make a wiki-like experience in drawing maps. That's why I hesitate to include any "default" icons with it. My idea was to provide a tool for drawing maps which targets the OSM community and not the general public (well at least not for now). So I guess certain aspects of it which seem impractical to a non-OSM user are (hopefully) not such a problem for an OSM user. This also applies to licensing issues - I expect OSM users to respect any copyrights.
Regards, Igor -- http://igorbrejc.net _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk