Terms of use
The non-commercial use and other restrictive terms make the data not useful for open, collaborative projects like OpenStreetMap.
Data needs to pass the "cake test"... If I want a special cake made that shows some map data as a decoration, then it needs to be allowed to freely share it (with the baker) who reuses it for profit (making a cake) and redistributes it.
It's also important to be able to mix data sources (city's data), with crowdsourced data from projects like OpenStreetMap or other sources. But, then as data gets mixed and redistributed downstream, it's impossible to accept "fully responsible for any consequences resulting from any use of the Data"
Examples of good terms of use include NRCAN's GeoGratis site:
http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/geogratis/en/licence.jsp
Seattle's Open Data site's terms of use are very simple (though the attribution text is onerous):
Katie Filbert
shared this idea
3 comments
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Brent Fraser
commented
What is wrong with commercial use? If someone intends to make a profit, that means their use is valuable to others (which is the whole point of making data available). Interesting that the license states "for the purpose of achieving monetary profit", which implies unintentional profit would be ok...
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grantneufeld
commented
This is critical if the “Public Data Catalog” is to be eventually turned into “Open Data”. The unusually restrictive licensing eliminates a significant portion (I’d guess the majority, but that’s supposition) of uses to which Open Data is being put in other jurisdictions.
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Thanks for the comment and we will consider all suggestions as we move forward with this pilot.
