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

Wed Mar 4 22:21:35 UTC 2009

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 10:10 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind at jhu.edu> wrote:
> 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.

if only complying with the spirit of the license were defensible in court.

> 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. :)

in my opinion it would be of no use to provide the dumps, as i have
added no useful information in the process of preparing my database.
providing the processing, storage and bandwidth to create, keep and
distribute these large dumps is a nuisance.

> 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?

there might be some provision under the "Collective Database"
provisions, but the line between Collective and Derived seems a bit
blurry to me.

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

only that a strict reading of the license would seem to imply that a
dump of the current database would be required. which opens the door
to effective denial of service attacks by using the resources of the
database host entirely for dumping and hosting dumps rather than
useful things like serving tiles.

cheers,

matt