What is the story with the maps in the routeboxes? It seems pretty haphazard which roads have them, and whether they are zoomed in, or show the whole country. There is also at least one that is incorrect - the A95 map only shows the primary section.

Is it possible to use SabreMaps and the route traces to generate maps like we now have in other infoboxes, or is there an easier/better solution to bring some conformity to them?

It's not exactly a pressing issue, but something that has been bugging me on and off for a couple of years now!

This thread has something to do with it. Tom and nowster know how to create the maps, I'm not sure myself. I do mean to sit down and do an automatic OSM map generator, which I think is possible.

I've stopped updating my copy of the OSM database since they kicked me out (and it ceased to be free to use). You can have the scripts if you want.

I must have missed something obvious here, but surely the "O" part of "OSM" means they can't do that. I'm pretty sure you can still get weekly dumps of the OSM database.

Anyway, wouldn't mind having a look at the scripts anyhow.

It's now under a mixture of CC-By-SA and a homebrew licence which is far more restrictive. I'd strongly suggest checking very closely whether generating a derived work (map) from it is allowed under the new licence.

I'm just about to go out, but will upload the scripts later. You'll need a PostgreSQL database with the UK & Ireland imported into it. That takes several hours unless you have over 8GB of RAM.

Happy to say that's not remotely the case.

It's not "now under a mixture". OSM continues to be distributed as CC-BY-SA only, until 31st March 2012. From 1st April it'll be distributed under the Open Database Licence. (Past data can of course still be used under the old terms.)

It's not "a homebrew licence". The Open Database Licence was drafted by lawyers specialising in IP, principally Jordan Hatcher and Charlotte Waelde. Its sponsoring organisation is the long-established Open Knowledge Foundation. It is used by the City of Paris for its open data releases, among others.

It's not "far more restrictive". It is still a share-alike, attribution licence, just like the current one. It's actually more permissive in one regard, in that you can create a Produced Work (say, a pretty map) from the data, and licence your pretty map in any way you like as long as you credit OSM. However, the corollary is that any data you add to the map has to be made available back to OSM - so, for example, Google can't take OSM data and add their own roads without having to give these back.

In areas of the world where there does not exist the ability to copyright database entries (mere facts), how can this licence apply? If it doesn't apply, there is either no grant of licence or the data are in the public domain.

ODbL is enforced through copyright; database right; and contract law. CC-BY-SA is enforced through copyright alone (though a few national 'ports', Belgium and the Netherlands IIRC, also take in database right). So in countries where copyright does not apply to compilations of factual data, such as potentially the States and Australia, CC-BY-SA doesn't 'protect' the OSM data whereas ODBL does.

But this probably belongs on OSM's legal-talk mailing list to avoid boring people here.

If you're into contract law, then there can't be a contract without "consideration". If an individual fact cannot be copyrighted, and it is not held as a trade secret, it's in the public domain, surely? Some countries allow aggregated facts (ie. a database) to be copyrighted, many don't.

The only way the GPL or CC work is that copyright law is more restrictive, and licensing rights are unilaterally granted by the copyright holder.

If it's not a licence but a contract that requires the consent (and in some places, signature) of both parties, and consideration.

This is relevant to us as SABRE if we're going to be making maps out of it using a copy of a portion of the OSM database, and displaying those maps to the whole world.

The fact that I'm a disenfranchised OSM contributor is only a minor part of this.

Not at all. I can't contribute much myself (other than hope all the OSM stuff I've reused on SABRE is above board to use), but the conversation is quite interesting from my point of view.

On that note, all the route traces you get on SABRE Maps are osm files lifted straight off the (insanely overloaded) OSM XAPI server.

Ritchie - I take your point and I'm happy to answer as best I can, but I'd note that I'm not a lawyer and so am unlikely to be able to give as definitive answers as the ones that have already been given over the past few years on legal-talk and elsewhere. But anyway...



On that specific point, I will indeed quote a lawyer on OSM legal-talk:





Yes, indeed. But you can't magically make a database of facts copyrighted by applying a copyright-based licence (such as GPL or the unported CC licences) to it. It's right there in the CC preamble: "Work means the copyrightable work of authorship offered under the terms of this License."

If it's not copyrightable, then the CC licences don't offer any protection. Creative Commons itself has in the past recommended against using its copyright-based licences for factual databases. The OSM community formed the view, though not unilaterally, that a share-alike licence with a higher probability of enforcement (via copyright, database right and contract) was preferable. Hence the move to the ODbL. No-one has claimed that it is guaranteed to enforce share-alike and attribution in 100% of cases, but the probability is very significantly higher than a copyright-only licence.

If you're not doing so already, use JXAPI or the Overpass API. Full details on the OSM XAPI page. XAPI is not really a "core" service but you'll hopefully find these much more responsive.

Another problem is that it's not a licence but a contract even though it calls itself a licence.

Is it unlawful if someone (in a jurisdiction which does not allow database copyright) were to declare that they were not agreeing to be bound by the contract, but uses the data anyway?

This might be a problem for us, as producing a map from a snapshot of a subset of the OSM database would mean us keeping the exact database that was used to produce that map, and offering it for download (about a gigabyte, compressed) to anyone who asked for it. If we updated the database to the latest version, we'd need to keep around (and offer) the older snapshots for download for as long as we had the maps that were derived from them. Difficult.

Well, it's both.


Ah, the whole privity thing. Yes, I believe OSMF could enforce the contract under the provisions of the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.


No, you don't have to do this. You can simply provide the 'diff' from whatever you downloaded from osm.org. A program or algorithm is admissible as the diff. It's entirely feasible that your diff might comprise (say) a single command line invoking osm2pgsql.