Обсуждение: Whence cometh the data in src/test/regress/data/streets.data ?

OK, I may be in a nitpicking mood today. :-)

IANAL, but it's my responsibility to check that Sun won't be violating
any copyright or licencing terms when delivering PostgreSQL with
(Open)Solaris.

I am now working on adding the regression tests ("gmake check") to the
8.3 packages integrated into OpenSolaris. While going through the list
of files I come across
 src/test/regress/data/streets.data

This file includes ~5000 test data entries which appear to be
geographical locations for end points of streets etc. in the San
Francisco Bay Area.

I don't think whoever made this has typed it all in, nor does it look
like random data, it almost certainly comes from a real data
source. Which means someone probably owns the copyright.

This file was checked in way back in July 1996, by Marc G. Fournier
but that doesn't mean he was the one who got the data from
somewhere. Does anyone know where it comes from? Or has this
information been lost in the mist of time?

If it's a US Goverment source, then it's in the public domain and
we[1] can freely use it. Otherwise, at least in theory, we may have a
problem.

[1] "we" can here be read as either "PostgreSQL" or "Sun".

-- 
Bjorn Munch                 Sun Microsystems
Trondheim, Norway       http://sun.com/postgresql/

Bjorn Munch <Bjorn.Munch@sun.com> writes:
> This file was checked in way back in July 1996, by Marc G. Fournier
> but that doesn't mean he was the one who got the data from
> somewhere. Does anyone know where it comes from? Or has this
> information been lost in the mist of time?

It's in the postgres v4r2 tarball with a file date of 1993-01-08,
which means nobody around the current project has a clue.

IANAL either, but I think it'd be fairly hard for anyone to assert a
copyright on it given that it's a compilation of publicly available
facts, and is surely not in the same format the information was
originally published in anyhow.
        regards, tom lane

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-hackers-owner@postgresql.org [mailto:pgsql-hackers-
> owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Tom Lane
> Sent: Friday, July 25, 2008 12:52 PM
> To: Bjorn Munch
> Cc: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Whence cometh the data in
> src/test/regress/data/streets.data ?
>
> Bjorn Munch <Bjorn.Munch@sun.com> writes:
> > This file was checked in way back in July 1996, by Marc G. Fournier
> > but that doesn't mean he was the one who got the data from
> > somewhere. Does anyone know where it comes from? Or has this
> > information been lost in the mist of time?
>
> It's in the postgres v4r2 tarball with a file date of 1993-01-08,
> which means nobody around the current project has a clue.
>
> IANAL either, but I think it'd be fairly hard for anyone to assert a
> copyright on it given that it's a compilation of publicly available
> facts, and is surely not in the same format the information was
> originally published in anyhow.

Probably something from here:
http://www.freegis.org/database/?cat=1

On 25/07 12.56, Dann Corbit wrote:
> 
> Probably something from here:
> http://www.freegis.org/database/?cat=1

The data predates this project by over 6 years. However, the data
looks quite similar to some of the data from the U.S. Census Bureau
for Alameda County, CA:

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tigerua/ua_tgr2k.html

The coordinates are not identical though, but they may have been
changed after PostgreSQL got them. And it looks like "our" data
somehow has the first decimal in the latitude cut off, so it has
37.841 instead of 37.6841 etc.

Anyway, even though such mapping data is definitely copyrightable,
since it's equivalent to the the above mentioned data which is in the
public domain (as it's a work of the US Goverment), I will conclude
that it's safe to use. :-)

- Bjorn