Hi folks, I'd like to add yet another 'flavour', maybe even some more fuel to the discussion about the OSM license.
Some of you know about the flight simulation software FlightGear. >From time to time, those who are involved in creating the FlightGear World Scenery are getting asked why they don't use OpenStreetMap road data for the Scenery. While there are some more winded reasons why this didn't happen until now, the by far most obvious reason is the OSM license, which, to our interpretation, puts us at the risk of a license violation if we distribute our Scenery with OSM road data being used for its build. The FlightGear project has strong roots in the OpenSource tradition for more than ten years now, therefore most questioners have "limited appreciation" for license barriers within the OpenSource world. Other reasons for not using OSM roads are somehow tied to the apparent license issue and therefore are to be considered as being of secondary importance. I'd to give you a rough idea about the process that builds the FlightGear Scenery. We have different sorts of vector data, mostly polygon landuse data either from the venerable VMap0 database, which covers the entire globe, automatically classified from Landsat7 images or simply hand-drawn. And we have some sources of line data, like the roads. The whole run-time Scenery is organized as a large, irregular triangle mesh. Thus, the roads which you see on the screenshot below, are also an application of triangles, shaped in a way to display the lengthy style of a broadened line. These triangles are covered by a predefined texture. Finally, there is no real line data anymore in the FlightGear Scenery, just an arrangement of coloured triangles which look like a line in the eye of the spectator. As a side note: I know that we're not the first ones to implement OSM roads into FlightGear Scenery. There is a use-case posted on the OSM Wiki: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Neat_Stuff#OSM_Data_in_a_Flight_Simulation Now, in order to provide an object to discuss about and maybe also to draw some public attention to the issue, we have prepared a nice chunk of FlightGear Scenery around the island of St. Kitts (ICAO: TKPK): http://foxtrot.mgras.net/static/caribbean-OSM.tar.bz2 We also have a 'representative' screenshot - see the little, winded grey lines: http://foxtrot.mgras.net/bitmap/FGFS/TKPK_03.png Several people would be happy to see this sort of use getting considered within future license discussions and maybe also in the forming of a possibly revised OSM license. So, how are we supposed to proceed wrt. use of OSM roads in a GPL-licensed project ? Cheers, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk