Reconciliation between CC and ODC [LWN.net]

Reconciliation between CC and ODC

Posted Jan 18, 2011 17:58 UTC (Tue) by mlinksva (subscriber, #38268)
In reply to: Reconciliation between CC and ODC by epa
Parent article: OpenStreetMap's point of no return

Of course the items you call out as 'awkward', 'odd', and 'unclear' are exactly those intended to address perceived problems with CC-BY-SA. I appreciate the attempt made by ODC/ODBL -- the intention (strong copyleft for data with provisions for some interoperability) seems noble. I'm sure a computer cartography licence developed by the right people would also be well intentioned. The problems are hard ones.

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Reconciliation between CC and ODC

Posted Jan 19, 2011 14:09 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

Of course the items you call out as 'awkward', 'odd', and 'unclear' are exactly those intended to address perceived problems with CC-BY-SA.

They address perceived problems with CC-BY-SA applied to abstract idea of a database which can be considered separate from its database contents. They are not such a good fit for maps or computer-based cartography, in my opinion. Nobody seems able to define which part of OpenStreetMap's data is the database and which part is the content. That distinction matters, since the project plans to use different licences for each part.

database/database contents

Posted Jan 19, 2011 17:24 UTC (Wed) by mlinksva (subscriber, #38268) [Link]

As far as I could tell the DbCL under which database contents are intended to be licensed post-move is intended to be a no-op, but I agree it is kind of confusing. Condition 2.2 of http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/ says "You must comply with the ODbL" and http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License#... says "This effectively means that end users of data published by the Foundation need to study only the ODbL rather than worrying about any special copyrights on individual elements of the database."

To what extent contents would effectively be covered by the ODbL and what that might mean in practice, I don't know.

Thanks for pointing this out. I thought I had some understanding of database/contents separation under ODbL/DbCL, but apparently not. Always good to learn of one's ignorance. :-/