[Freegis-list] Looking for a FreeGIS maintainer for geodata entries

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Sun, Jul 17, 2005 at 11:44:53PM +0200, Chris Holmes wrote:
> I'm potentially interested in this, though really shouldn't take on
> more duties.  But I'm not sure about the license thing - what licenses
> are 'acceptable' to you?  I mean, honestly the GPL doesn't really
> cover anything other than software, it's very specifically aimed at
> software, and even C++ at that, with the static linking and all.
> 
> My organization (The Open Planning Project, we're a non-profit in nyc,
> primary supporter of geoserver) is going to be looking into building
> tools to help enable more open datasets - community editing tools on
> top of WFS like attributions, revisioning, history, rollbacks,
> security, ect. - wiki like functionality and beyond.  And then a part
> of it is we'll probably try to get Creative Commons working on some
> map data specific licenses.  I met Lessig in South Africa and he
> seemed interested in having CC work on them - they have a few
> thoughts, since data can't actually be copyrighted, but there are
> ideas on how to get around that.  I think even just a set of licenses
> for mapping data could help us a lot, to point at something clear that
> people could stick on their data.  That combined with much better,
> standards based tools for collaboration I think may help open geo data
> out a lot.

licensing for geodata is indeed a matter that needs further discussion.
So far, most datasets are Public Domain or some BSDish license, some
are GNU GPL. Some CC are interesting as well.

For FreeGIS, this remains an open discussion. Of course some things
are clear, such as: limited use or no right to distribute renders
a dataset non-free.

I'd love also to see a license discussion come up. Many projects
are looking for better licenses for their geodata.
GNU GPL is definitly for Software and of limited applicability for
geodata. A more suitable license with the same base idea as GNU GPL
is something I am personally interested in.

Best

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