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Comment by Rounin | Hacker News Reader

As far as licences go, though, the terms and conditions regulating usage of OpenStreetMap now fill not three documents, but three SECTIONS on the OpenStreetMap Foundation's wiki. However liberal these licences may be, for the money it would cost me to hire a lawyer to read through them, I could just buy access to a commercial service.

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The lawyer is almost certainly going to be significantly cheaper than the cost of the commercial service on an ongoing basis.

I suppose you're right. After all, one is a one-time cost, and the other is an ongoing cost. So that's a positive thing, at least.

Are the terms and conditions of these commercial services any shorter?

That's a good point. It doesn't make me more optimistic about the situation, but it's certainly a good observation.

Even if you would hire lawyer, it would be often far less expensive.

And for many uses there is no viable alternative.

That does put it into perspective. Perhaps one shouldn't be too quick to dismiss it outright.

Sorry to hear it, but it seems that plenty of other applications felt the lawyers were worth it. I'm curious what exactly you believe the risk to be, except I don't think this comment is really made in good faith

I find the license very confusing - does any dataset generated from the database have to be released freely to anyone who asks? Or is it only a customer that purchases the dataset? Where is the distinction between a product of the db and the db, which are subject to different terms? For anything which isn’t displaying a standard base map it is confusing.

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