[OSGeo-Edu] reminder, monthly chat tomorrow at 8am US-Central, UTC-5 hours

[Jo Walsh]

dear all,

On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 10:15:13AM -0500, P Kishor wrote:
> 2. Developing a commons-type license for geospatial data -- are there
> any special considerations for geospatial data that we should be aware
> of, that we should lobby for.

Within the geodata group there's been a bit of thinking about this -
this is more of an early-days linkdump than an ongoing discussion:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Licensing_Working_Group 

The best candidate license i know of is the PGL, linked from there.
This was an effort begun by Daniel Faivre of camptocamp, and picked up
by Dave Sampson who's now a core member of the Ottawa OSGeo chapter - 
https://ottawa.osgeo.org/servlets/ForumMessageList?forumID=19

The core 'extra' consideration identified by the PGL posse has been
metadata licensing and what terms apply to it as well as data.
The Canadian government geodata licenses linked there also look really
promising. It seems as if all the best things happen in Canada... 

There are also a lot of thorny 'derived work' considerations when it
comes to geocoding and georeferencing from a licensed body of work.
A provocative "worst case scenario" was produced by Richard Fairhurst:
http://www.systemed.net/blog/entry060311122655.html
"ShareAlike Considered Harmful"... 

>From where i'm sitting, it looks very much as if *specific licenses*
have caused an awful lot of fruitless painful discussion with regards
to collectively produced and maintained geodata - i've seen this
discussion circle round and round on the openstreetmap talk and
legal-talk lists and reach no conclusion. I find efforts to describe a
set of principles to which a given data license should comply, very
attractive (think "OSI-compliant") particularly this one:

http://okd.okfn.org/ <- Open Knowledge Definition 

Also worth checking out is the approach to developing a license-first
open geodata repository within Harlan Onsrud's group at U.Maine:

http://geodatacommons.umaine.edu/

I would absolutely love to reach a conclusion to a geodata licensing
discussion. But, you know despite the fact that "open source has won"
there are still gangs of people here in Cambridge shouting at each
other "open is not free!" / "free is not open!", and they're still
talking about *software* ;) 

cheers, 


jo