@Nakaner

The post perhaps should make it more clear, but Natural Atlas uses the following things from OSM: Roads, Parking Areas, Residential/Commericial Areas, Interstate Exits, Buildings (Only the geometry, none of the attributes), and a small handful of other features. These things are only visually shown on the map, and are not tied to the website in any way.

Anything that has a page on the website is -not- derived from OSM in any way. Campgrounds, trailheads, hydrography, etc. either come from public domain government datasets, or we have manually added them in. The geographic data for these features is what cannot be used “commercially without explicit written consent”.

We are not mixing OSM data with other datasets and are well within the terms of the OSM license. The OSM data remains ODbL, but the Natural Atlas specific data is not ODbL.

Perhaps some day we will consider opening this data up, but strategically it isn’t practical right now. We have spent a massive amount of time blending and cleaning the different datasets that have gone into the map. Also, as we have just started, we don’t have much traction yet. Opening this data would greatly benefit our competition that does have traction.

About #1: We can’t forbid you from vectorizing OSM data from the map, but I don’t get why you would want to do that. Everything else on the map is not under ODbL for the above reason.

About #2: I agree with @lxbarth on this.

@lxbarth

I agree that clarifying the ToS would be a good thing to do. About the license of user-placed markers on the map: I have been curious about the same thing. Unless in a court someone could prove that a lot of markers were simply duplicated or derived from OSM features without a doubt, I don’t see how those markers would fall under ODbL.

The lack of clarity of the ODbL license is one very big reason why we decided not to use OSM for our outdoor features that show up on the website. We will not be spending time updating trails, campgrounds, trailheads, and such in OSM for this reason. We will spend as much time as possible improving roads and encouraging others to do the same however.

The other reason for it is a technical reason. Because of OSM’s loose nature, it would be very difficult to maintain a one-to-one link between things on the map and pages on the website.