[Freegis-list] Campaign for rejecting Inspire directive?

[Jo Walsh]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 07:47:17AM +0200, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
> 1. draft an explicit model (or more) for open geodata licence, as an 
> alternative to current situation; this may follow GPL, or the Creative 
> Commons; care should be taken not to allow what NMA pecieve as theft of data 
> from commercial companies
> 2. put together a few lines on why geodata should be free (examples from the 
> USA, etc); several of you have already written good things about this
> 3. start circulating a petition on this; it worked for software patents, why 
> not for geodata?

http://okfn.org/geo/minifesto.php is the attempt i have made to do
this. There is a draft non-commercial use Creative Commons based license linked
there which was submitted to our NMA, the Ordnance Survey, and more or
less sank without trace. 

There is a signup system on the bottom on of the document, the idea is
you register your support for the statements it contains. Steve Coast
created a 'pledge' when i started putting it together, which includes
a pledge to donate ten quid to the good cause of making our own free
of copyright maps and tools to help others do it:
http://www.pledgebank.com/geodata

Asking for generalised data - 5/10m would not be unacceptable -
wouldn't impact too severely on the business model that the NMAs are
attempting to preserve. Meanwhile the press reports that our
e-government initiatives are being held back because of disputes
over intellectual property rights concerning the OS's holding and
distribution of other authorities' street and addressing data: 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1550761,00.html

Canada seems the best bet for acquiring hard numbers on the economic
and innovative positive effect of actively opening up geodata access,
with active government funding of open source GIS projects such as uDig.
( http://udig.refractions.net/ , http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/ )  
I hear Canada is releasing a big, TIGER-style open access street and
addressing model soon if not already.


-jo