[Geodata] Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] defining a Geospatial Integration Showcase to be launched at FOSS4G 2009

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 12:24:15PM -0500, jo at frot.org wrote:
> dear Cameron, all,
> 
>  Quoting Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter at gmail.com>:
>  > Does OSGeo have an official stance on data licencing? If not, I think
>  > we should.
> 
> No, it doesn't. Last year I started work on an "Open Geodata Licensing 
> Guide";
> not a recommendation but an overview of the options with their  
> benefits and drawbacks, written with an audience of public  
> administrations in mind.
> It hasn't been updated in the light of recent discussions.
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Guide_to_Public_Geodata_Licensing

Thanks; I hadn't been aware of this. I think that if we were to go ahead
with it, it could be a valuable talking point: my recent email here is
only a minor summary of many months worth of observations of
discussions, which I should have been conglomerating into this wiki
page. (I can't say that I'm really likely to devote explicit time to it
at the moment, but I definitely feel like it's the right path forward!)

>  An official stance could be Quite Powerful. I want to avoid stirring  
> up fruitless controversy though!
> 
>  >>> Same as OpenStreetMap
> 
> I'm looking forward to the conclusion of the OSM relicensing effort  
> which has been generating a lot of heat recently. However their  
> eventual solution will be geared to aggregate collections with many  
> contributors and not (initially)
> appropriate for public authority data sets.

I'm not convinced that it's neccesarily inappropriate for public
authority data sets; the licenses that I've seen so far, though
especially catered to many-users-one-database, are not *hostile* towards
other uses, and I think that the OSM crowd have been pushing towards
something I certainly think is more appropriate -- if agencies want the
benefits supposedly afforded by CC-By-SA -- than existing CC licenses
being applied to non-creative data.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer