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by rjmunro 5 days ago
Surely military drones will use OpenStreetMap data? Even the Russians and Iranians can use it for whatever purpose they like.
2 comments

Yes. Just like editing wikipedia will help train models that are used for data classification in north korea or whatever.

It's a feature of open data, it's open and usable by anyone.

... for any purpose.
Yes. Or you can license it for specific purposes. But in general open data refers to data that is open to use by anyone, for any purpose, without restrictions except in some cases attribution.
A license only means something if you can enforce it. This means you can catch violations, and get courts to enforce it in a way that means something. If you can't catch a violation it is de facto allowed. What a license can restrict is limited by law, and so depending on the terms the court may say "you are not allowed to restrict that: they are allowed, go away". Or the court may impose a fine that is small enough everyone considers it a cost of doing business. How this plays out depends on the violation as well: if the violator can show they did their best to not violate that is very different from intentional violation. (I'm convinced the GPL will be broken - when a company shows they have lots of process to prevent the misuse, but a "rogue employee" hid their actions - the company will pay a fine but won't have to give their source code.)
With attribution
I wonder how many of these drones deliver a .txt copy of the GPL along with their payload.
Only if you publish something.
Everything you do online publicly is usable in principle. Might as well also be public good. And my understanding is that Pokémon go made use of the camera. The kind of data you add using street complete is like "does this crossing have a traffic light?"