Free Street Map Data?
If you’re interested in GIS, you’ve surely come across the OpenStreetMap project — they’re working to “provide free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them.”
Only problem is their rather unexpected choice of license for their data: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license
This choice of licensing means that any data aggregated and distributed with theirs must also be licensed under the CC share-alike license — this includes any data your customers might wish to aggregate with map data. This is more or less a non-starter for any non-hobbiest project — commercial or otherwise. At what point does “aggregation” of factual data end? Does it ever?
The project has attempted to address this licensing quandry, but work in that direction is mired in a seemingly never-ending political morass: see this mailing list thread. There is a proposal to move to the “Open Database License”, which still applies the same “share-alike” restrictions to derivative databases (as opposed to, say, rendered maps). This improves the situation, but not by much — this licensing precludes the use in projects requiring aggregated data (ie, most of them) without share-alike licensing.
What amuses me the most is OpenStreetMap’s heavy reliance on public domain data — They’re happy to repackage it under more restrictive terms than it arrived.
Seems like there’s room for an ActuallyOpenStreetMaps project.
