OpenStreetMap
Hello.
Just found this site. Apologies for not finding it sooner.
My particular slant is postcodes.
I was a coder for about 20 years. Mortgages. Yep, Mortgages. Spent a while - or, actually, several whiles - writing a postcode validation routine. The post office then released their database - released? I mean started selling - on a CD! A CD? Wow! We'll have some of that. The very thing we were looking for. See, we had just bought a PC with a CD player in it! I did wonder if it would ever come in useful for anything other than a Dire Straits album...
Must say, as the years passed, I realised that the money I was paying the PO could have paid for two more coders. Why don't they just write the database? I investigated and found out that - even if you type it in from scratch - you are still violating copyright. Well, violating is what I do best. So I set about creating my own postcode database. Mind, the thing I do second best is procrastinating. So my database has yet to progress beyond seven - no six - streets away from me. I'll get to seven Tuesday week.
Simpy
I saw an interesting comment in the blogs. It said that the American zipcode database is in the public domain. I would be fascinated to hear a history of how it got there. Were there debates at a high level? Was it just passed through on a nod? Was there a campaign?
Anyway. heh, heh, that word is somewhat ironic don't you think? No? OK.
Discussion
Comment from zenfunk on 16 October 2009 at 12:34
The American zipcode database is in the pupblic domain probably because the US governement mustn't put a copyright on its work. This is the same reason why the Tiger road data for the US got imported into OSM or why you can download marine cahrts from NOAA without any problems.
Comment from davespod on 16 October 2009 at 12:45
If your seven postcodes were collected from non-copyright sources (and definitely not from doing searches on the Royal Mail DB!), why not add them to one of the slightly (!) larger free databases:
http://www.npemap.org.uk/
45,000 and counting... mark them on out-of-copyright maps.
If you collected these seven postcodes using a GPS, you could also add them here:
http://www.freethepostcode.org/
Never really looked at this one, but it also includes addresses:
http://postcodedb.sourceforge.net/
And, of course, you could add them to OpenStreetMap!
Comment from Circeus on 16 October 2009 at 13:28
The US postcode is free, but IIRC, the USPS does not sell an actual complete version of it (private companies do, or try to, however).