OpenStreetMap licence?

Posted Nov 24, 2010 21:49 UTC (Wed) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap licence? by ballombe
Parent article: Microsoft helping OpenStreetMap

"It goes as far as forbidding use that would be legal according to copyright law."

The problem here is that copyright law is _very_ complex and nuanced when it comes to geodata. Remember - depending on your region, there may be more than copyright that is applicable to the data - e.g. "database rights".

"We wondered why OSM moved to self-destruct mode with the ODL and copyright assignment. Now we know: Microsoft is involved."

This is nonsense. Whatever you think of the license, the motivation behind it was with the best of intentions.

The "self destruct mode" is also very exaggerated. What we have is _relatively_ few dissenters who are making a lot of noise and are tiring out most of the sane voices. Remember - keeping the data CC-BY-SA is effectively the same as making it public domain because CC-BY-SA is not really applicable to map data.