The world of open source — and in particular open source licenses — is something we cover regularly here at Hackaday with respect to hardware and software, but it’s not so often we find open source data stories. Today’s case of the open British address data then is a bit of an outlier, but it may have implications for open source data further than British counties.

UK government data is released under the Open Government Licence, which is why we Brits can peer into all sorts of datasets our taxes paid for. This includes data from local government, so English counties release data sets of local addresses as part of their auditing of council taxes under the licence.

[Owen Boswarva] has been collating these databases in order to produce a national open source address database, but has found himself at the receiving end of a legal threat from the Ordnance Survey, the UK mapping agency. They claim the data is theirs, not open.

British address data is in a sense open to all, in that there’s nothing to stop anyone walking down Acacia Avenue and noting the position of Number 1, Number 2, Number 3, and so on. This is what happened with OpenStreetMap worldwide, as people with GPS devices contributed their data and mapped the UK and everywhere else. The Ordnance Survey used to have a nice little earner charging top dollar for UK geospatial data which has been slashed by the arrival of OpenStreetMap, and we’re guessing that the prospect of losing another income stream to an open source equivalent has them worried.

The question of whether the councils should have released the data is one which will no doubt be settled at some point by the courts, and [Owen] goes into some detail on the subject in his analysis. There’s a good case to be made that the mapping agency are pushing it a little, but whatever the outcome it could set a dangerous precedent for open source data. We’ll keep you posted if there’s more on this story.

British street: Bill Harrison, CC BY-SA 2.0

Barbra Streisand: Unknown author, Public domain