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evansiroky / timezone-boundary-builder

A tool to extract data from Open Street Map (OSM) to build the boundaries of the world's timezones.
MIT License
852 stars 81 forks source link

Switch to ODC-By or PDDL licenses? #74

Closed kueda closed 4 years ago

kueda commented 4 years ago

I would like to use this time zone data to set time zones for the biodiversity observtions we have on iNaturalist (currently time zones are semi-manually chosen and it's a big mess, surprise). However, the Share-Alike clause of the ODbL license you've chosen might be a deal breaker. If I'm reading the license correctly, if we pull these time zone shapes into a table in our database, we would be obliged to publish the entire database under the ODbL, right? We share a lot of our data openly, but obviously our entire database has a lot of sensitive information in it that we cannot publish. Even if you don't think that's the case, the legal uncertainty surrounding that is giving me hives. Would you consider switching to an ODC-By or PDDL license instead?

Related: who should be attributed, you (Evan Siroky), the Open Street Map contributors, or both? Should the attribution happen in our code base (e.g. in a README in our github repo), or on the live site?

kohenkatz commented 4 years ago

@kueda I'm not the creator of this project, but from my reading of the license it seems like you won't have a problem with it. Specifically, this part:

“Collective Database” – Means this Database in unmodified form as part of a collection of independent databases in themselves that together are assembled into a collective whole. A work that constitutes a Collective Database will not be considered a Derivative Database.

In other words, if you include the date from this database inside your own database, you would be required to make it known that people can come back to this project to get the original data but it would not require you to share the other parts of your data.

The exception is if you actually modify this data when you put it into your database. In that case, you would be required to release the modifications publicly, but still not the entire database.

evansiroky commented 4 years ago

The ODbL was picked since that is the license that OpenStreetMap uses. It's certainly my intent to allow people to use this data without releasing all their other application data. As @kohenkatz notes, I'm pretty sure the ODbL explicitly allows this. IANAL, but section 4.5.a seems to be the relevant section of the ODbL that does not require the rest of your database to be shared publicly or to have the ODbL license as well.

I'm going to go ahead and close this issue, but if I am wrong about this and there are any further hindrances preventing you from using this data, then please re-open.

kueda commented 4 years ago

Many thanks for the replies.