[odc-discuss] ODbL: Does publishing Produced Work from Derivative Database trigger Derivative Database ShareAlike?

Wed Mar 4 22:10:23 UTC 2009

Hmm, what's impractical about providing an entire database dump on say a 
nightly basis?  It seems to me you'd be complying with the spirit of the 
license by providing nightly or even weekly dumps, rather than 
this-exact-moment dumps.

It may be somewhat inconvenient, but it seems the easiest way to comply 
with what the licensors would be intending, which is apparently 
intentionally designed to force you to share info even  if it's not 
convenient. :)

Now, if you had _other_ data in the db which you did not believe that 
you needed to share (or worse yet, that you licensed from someone else 
under conditions that did not ALLOW you to share it), that would become 
_much_ more unworkable.  And I'd have no good solution then. I'm not 
sure if the intent of this license is in fact to prevent people from 
combining open street map data in a database which ALSO includes 
commercial licensed non-open data? 

But if you're willing to provide a complete dump of the db, I'm not 
seeing what makes that impractical.

Jonathan

Matt Amos wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 9:56 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind at jhu.edu> wrote:
>   
>> Sorry, I don't mean to muddy the waters instead of trying to help, but I
>> can't resist.
>>
>> What if the derived database is constantly changing?
>>     
>
> my use case is very similar - the database is constantly receiving
> updates from the openstreetmap database, making a "full dump" solution
> impractical.
>
>   
>> Say they take your
>> data, and put it in another database that also allows user
>> contributions? And the users can not only add new data, but fix/change
>> the data they got from you?  This is not an unreasonable use case, I
>> don't think?
>>     
>
> i think it is very reasonable. and you're right - i have no idea how
> to practically comply with the license in this case. will this
> effectively prevent anyone building useful interactive things on top
> of openstreetmap data?
>
>   
>> What would the 'diff' they have to provide look like at any given time,
>> and how the heck would they track it?
>>
>> I'm not sure why you guys arrived at a 'diff' solution in the first
>> place, but I'm sure there's some reason I'm missing. If you instead just
>> said that the entire derived database needs to be available in an easily
>> machine readable format, would that get around some of the issues of the
>> 'diff'? Ignore the 'diff' entirely?
>>     
>
> the current license allows both the entire database to be provided, or
> diffs. the problem that i have is that neither are practical for me to
> provide.
>
>   
>> Or, I see, you're trying to _avoid_
>> making the derived database 'sharealike' infected, but still require
>> them to share certain things.  I'm not sure how workable this is in the
>> general case. If it gets so complicated that it's hard to understand
>> what the requirements are and how to meet them easily, then compliance
>> is going to go down.
>>     
>
> i don't think anyone is trying to complicate the license - in fact,
> i'd prefer it to be much, much simpler. but we may not all be able to
> agree on this ;-)
>
> cheers,
>
> matt
>   