[Freegis-list] Campaign for rejecting Inspire directive?

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 11:28:21PM -0700, Jo Walsh wrote:
> 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. 

note that a license for non-commercial use in conjunction with example
of the US-Model is a bad idea. The US-Model is successful because it is
not just 'free for non-commercial use' - they made the data public domain
which naturally inludes the commercial use.

Well, in Europe the status of 'public domain' could only be reached
through waiting 80 (IIRC) years. It can't be used as a 'license'.
Hence, indeed we must have a license for geodata.

Next, I believe that we have the chance only for a single license within
decades to get lobbied until implementation.
Though a free-for-non-commercial-use license might be easier and faster
to get a consensus on, it would block the implementation of a license
concept similar to the US and thus block all the economic potentials.

IMHO, it is not good anyway to use 'not-for-commercial-use' licenses
at all. This is because 'Commercial' is not defined.
For me, even most (soon all) universities are commercial entities; in
fact it is hard to name any organization that truely could use geodata
or software and act non-commerical.
Debatable, of course! But thats the actual threat: it is debatable. You
could find yourself at court because the owner might have
a different view on what you though was a non-commercial activity.

> 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.

I'd be interested if that one is licensed with 'non-commercial'
restrictions. Anyone knows?

Best

	Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/
Intevation GmbH                      http://intevation.de/
Kolab Konsortium               http://kolab-konsortium.de/
FreeGIS                                http://freegis.org/