Re: Looking for a FreeGIS maintainer for geodata entries

On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 02:29:06AM -0700, Jo Walsh wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 11:33:33PM +0200, Jan-Oliver Wagner wrote:
> > licensing for geodata is indeed a matter that needs further discussion.
> > So far, most datasets are Public Domain or some BSDish license, some
> > are GNU GPL. Some CC are interesting as well.
> 
> on the openstreetmap mailing list we've had a lot of discussion about
> open geodata licensing in a practical context, leading to no definite
> conclusion other than a loose convergence on CC-BY-SA but that too has
> its drawbacks.
> 
> http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/pipermail/openstreetmap/2005-January/000211.html
> http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/pipermail/openstreetmap/2005-February/000271.html
> http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/pipermail/openstreetmap/2005-April/000488.html
> 
> Giles Lane got advice from Creative Commons UK on putting together a
> CC-style license as a model for the Ordnance Survey which could be
> uses for nonprofit licensing of possibly slightly generalised
> state-collected geodata.
> http://www.okfn.org/geo/geodata_cc_license_draft.rtf

IMHO any license excluding commercial use creates the risk for
anyone using the data because "commercial use" is not defined.

In practice, even most universities can not be called anymore
to act non-commercial.
The same applies to "non-profit". A profit can even be any
arbitrary thing other than money.

Best

	Jan
-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/
Intevation GmbH                      http://intevation.de/
Kolab Konsortium               http://kolab-konsortium.de/
FreeGIS                                http://freegis.org/