We have just received the CC BY waiver from Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Manufacturing and Regional and Rural Development (DNRMMRRD) which covers all of their CC BY 4.0 licensed open data published at https://www.data.qld.gov.au/dataset/?organization=resources.
Satellite and Aerial Imagery published by the department is not covered.
This is something the community has been hoping to obtain for a while, I sent a formal request for the waiver in May 2017 (8 years and 6 months ago) and at the time the department (DNRM) stated that they believed that a CC BY license is sufficient for use of their data in OpenStreetMap and they did not accept that OpenStreetMap could not use their data under CC BY, which is fine that’s their interpretation of the license but the issue was that the OSMF LWG took a different interpretation that we cannot use CC BY data directly in OSM, and this issue became a sticking point that we could not get past after considerable efforts, including a follow up request in 2018.
Following this, Nemanja Bracko continued to work on obtaining the waiver and eventually in 2020 they received a letter Naming roads/streets in Queensland, Australia · Issue #49 · microsoft/Open-Maps · GitHub however subsequent review by the LWG determined that this was still not sufficient, leading to the matter once again being stalled.
Following this, Graeme Fitzpatrick continued working on the issue around 2023, instead trying to work through the Premier and continuing into 2024 through Mark Wheeley at the Department of Communities, Housing and Digital Economy who manage the Queensland Government Open Data Portal.
It was through this approach and the ongoing work behind the scenes last year and throughout this year that we have now received the completed CC BY waiver.
Thank you to everyone involved in making this happen.
I’ll be working through what layers we can get into the editors as background layers and overlays, at the same time it opens up using these datasets in import proposals.