[Geodata] Re: [Aust-NZ] NZ geodata on OSGEO?

[Hamish]

Bruce.Bannerman wrote:
> Sorry to drag this conversation out.

I'm a bit confused as to what the problem is. They already distribute it
under a permissive license- so lets just use that, be happy, and send
them a courtesy thank note giving them a heads-up about what we've done.

I don't really see the need to add any of our own license terms, but if
we were to do that I think the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
license seems compatible both legally and in the spirit of theirs
(although it adds some copyleft provisions which are not present in
theirs). This is the license that the North Carolina, USA OSGeo Edu
dataset uses.
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The advantage of redistributing with a known & trusted license is that
3rd parties are much more likely to touch it and have the confidence to
build upon it.


As for prior goings- we have, with permission, distrubuted LINZ's NZGD49
distortion grid with both PROJ.4 and GRASS GIS for a number of years. In
that case the terms were not quite as clear at the outset and a
clarification letter was sought.
see  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.grass.devel/1492/

But again, in our current case I don't see any ambiguity so don't see why
we can't just proceed with confidence.


> We need to be realistic as to what can and can't be achieved here.
> Don't expect an overnight change in policy.

In this case, we don't need any change of policy. They're already a step
ahead of us! :)


As far as the NZ Census data goes, I think we should stick to
redistributing and building on the geographic and population scale stuff.
ie nothing that goes anywhere near the Privacy Act, then we can be both
respectful and not have to worry about legal issues at the same time.


regards,
Hamish


ps - A document which touches these issues and something I have been
meaning to promote here wrt incorporation: The Software Freedom Law
Center's "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software
Projects", March 2008.
  http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/foss-primer.html

It makes for good reading.






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