Whether for commercial software or open source projects, the crafting of a license is one of the most important decisions a company or team can make. The license determines who can use the software, how it can be used as well as how it can be shared. Open data projects, while different from open source software, face the same types of questions.
OpenStreetMap is probably the single largest and most significant open data project in the geospatial realm. The project was started because “most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways.” Up until now, OSM has been using a license called Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA). However, OpenStreetMap is more like a database than it is like a text document or photograph and database projects have run into some specific problems with the CC family of licenses. The OpenStreetMap project is proposing a move to the Open Database License (ODbL). Like many collaborative projects, the move is being made by submitting the change and the justification for it to the community for review, comment and vote.
Why make this move? What’s wrong with the CCBYSA license? A lot of people use the CC licenses to publish their articles, photos, paintings and other creative work. But the various forms of the Creative Commons licenses are designed to work within the legal infrastructure the surrounds the concept of copyright. Structured databases are collections of facts. When factual data (like streets drawn on a map) are arranged the way you’d expect it to be, it’s not necessarily protected by copyright law, particularly under U.S. copyright law, which only protects works that arise from creativity. If copyright doesn’t apply to factual data and the CC licenses are based on copyright law, we have a problem. The is the core of the issue. Even the Creative Commons folks have said that the CCBYSA license should not be applied to databases.
The new proposal, ODbL, resolves the issues by applying copyright where it applies and applying contract law where it does not. It attempts to take the best of both worlds and create a happy medium that applies to database projects like OSM. As perhaps the largest open database in the world, OSM was one of the touchstone cases that the Open Data Commons and Open Knowledge Foundation used to build the license.
But it’s also interesting to note what it won’t cover. The ODbL will only apply to distribution of the OSM database. Contributions to OSM (like GPX tracks and other database edits) are covered by a Contributor Agreement which will refer to the ODbL as the means of distributing their contributions. It won’t cover image tiles generated based on the OSM database. It won’t cover the OSM wiki, which, since it is text and therefore considered a creative work, will remain covered by CCBYSA. And it won’t cover the software source code used to run the entire OSM system – that will be usually, but not always, be covered by the GPL.
There remains some controversy within the OSM community. Many members, including one of the founders advocating for the change, feel that a completely free, Public Domain license (no limits on usage) would be preferable. The ODbL will retain the “share-alike” concept of the current CCBYSA license (requiring both attribution and that changes be submitted back to the community and distribution carry the same terms). They feel that the spirit of reciprocity codified in this approach is stronger. The new OSM license will include both the concept of attribution and share-alike because many members of the community feel that this limitation benefits the project. Nonetheless, others feel strongly that a truly public domain situation would be better in the long run, encouraging broad usage without consideration for consequences. In the best democratic tradition, however, both sides express their positions in Vote Yes and Vote No pages. Check them out. And if you are an active member of the OSM Foundation, make sure you cast your vote.
You may be tempted to file this under “boring”, but the nuances of licenses are an important part of the creative economy in which we operate. They set the terms under which we interact with each others work.
Articles by Robert Cheetham
Common Cause of Pennsylvania has launched a new web site and blog, Our Philadelphia, to educate the public about elected officials. Unlike many states, Pennsylvania has no limits on campaign contributions, and the online contribution databases maintained by the state and by the City of Philadelphia are barely usable with much of the data not available at all. A search for contributions that would take minutes in a more transparent state, like Maryland, would take hundreds of hours in Pennsylvania. So Common Cause is building its own web site and database to make this data available. But wait, there’s more. The site will include several features: 
