[Freegis-list] GeoGratis

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

Frank,

On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 08:47:07AM -0500, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Jan-Oliver Wagner wrote:
> > I emailed Geogratis first time Feb 9th 2000 and
> > asked them to whether the terms of use (which are not 100% clear to me)
> > can be interpreted in the way that the data are free, free in the sense of free speech.
> > I asked again Feb 26th 2001 due to Franks hint.
> > 
> > I never received an answer.
> > Does anyone on this list has had some contact with Geogratis?
> 
> What particular questions do you have?  According to the most prominantely
> displayed terms (http://www.geogratis.ca/e_license.html) I think the data
> would not qualify as properly free because clause 4 indicates that the
> data is not licensed for redistribution via the Internet without modification.
> 
> I believe this clause exists because of an ill-advised desire to keep track
> of the number of copies being used by tracking the number of copies downloaded.
> This helps justify program funding.  

Yes, I think so, too. But as you state (below) it would be simple to
undermine this :-)

Here is an excerpt of my email to geogratis:

Especially one term concerns me:

"... but Canada retains all ownership interests in the Data."

Does this mean that Canada can cancel the license
agreement at any time as it is possible for most 
proprietary software products such as those by MicroSoft?

If that is true it would mean dependency and an unbearable risk
to use the data and it would certainly not be free in the sense
of free speech.

BTW, is the mandatory prominent permission reference to Canada
in any derived work really
necessary. To my mind it is sufficient to hold the Copyright
and forbid to remove it (which probably is clearified in (1.) ).

> Note that the problem clause does not apply to modified data, so perhaps
> someone could stage the interesting datasets modify by translating into 
> another file format or something similarly harmless.  
:-)

Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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