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Overture Maps — Licensing#

This is the headline, novel piece of the Overture backend: per-row license provenance. Overture aggregates data from many upstream sources with different licenses, and the obligations differ. If you redistribute Overture-derived data — especially commercially — you must know which rows carry which license. earthlens.overture surfaces this per feature.

The two licenses that matter#

  • CDLA-Permissive-2.0 — the Community Data License Agreement (Permissive). The permissive bulk of Overture. No share-alike obligation.
  • ODbL-1.0 — the Open Database License, carried by OpenStreetMap-derived rows. A copyleft / share-alike license: redistributing or building a derivative database obliges you to attribute and to share the derived database under ODbL too.

Other licenses appear on individual sources (e.g. Apache-2.0, CC0-1.0), but the legally load-bearing distinction is ODbL vs not.

How earthlens surfaces it#

Every fetched GeoDataFrame carries a per-row license_id column, and a LicenseWarning is emitted when any ODbL-1.0 rows are present:

import warnings
from earthlens.earthlens import EarthLens
from earthlens.overture import LicenseWarning

with warnings.catch_warnings(record=True) as caught:
    warnings.simplefilter("always")
    paths = EarthLens(
        data_source="overture",
        variables={"buildings": []},
        lat_lim=[40.757, 40.759],
        lon_lim=[-73.987, -73.984],
        path="out",
    ).download()

# Building footprints in many cities are OSM-derived -> ODbL, so a
# LicenseWarning is emitted naming the obligation.
assert any(issubclass(w.category, LicenseWarning) for w in caught)

import geopandas as gpd

gdf = gpd.read_parquet(paths[0])
gdf["license_id"].value_counts()
# ODbL-1.0    45

The derivation rule#

The per-row license_id is derived from the row's sources column — a list of source structs {property, dataset, license, record_id, update_time, confidence} — in this order:

  1. ODbL wins. If any source carries ODbL-1.0 or names the OpenStreetMap dataset, the row is ODbL-1.0. The share-alike obligation dominates the combined feature, so it wins outright — this is deliberately not "first non-empty license", because an ODbL source that is not listed first must still be caught.
  2. Otherwise, the explicit licenses. If the sources carry explicit permissive licenses, the row is the sorted, "; "-joined set of those distinct licenses (e.g. Apache-2.0; CDLA-Permissive-2.0 for a place built from Foursquare + Overture). This is faithful to a feature built from multiple permissively-licensed sources.
  3. Otherwise, the fallback. With no explicit license field (older releases), the row falls back to CDLA-Permissive-2.0, Overture's default. An OpenStreetMap dataset with no explicit license still maps to ODbL-1.0 via step 1.

The same rule is exposed as earthlens.overture.row_license for post-hoc analysis of a sources cell.

Per-theme expectations#

Theme Typical licensing
buildings Mixed: many footprints are OSM-derived (ODbL-1.0); others CDLA-Permissive-2.0.
places Mostly permissive (Meta/Foursquare → CDLA-Permissive / Apache), with some OSM (ODbL).
transportation Heavily OSM-derived → expect ODbL-1.0.
divisions Largely OSM-derived → expect ODbL-1.0.

Always check license_id on the rows you actually use rather than assuming a theme-wide license.

Your obligation#

When ODbL-1.0 rows are present and you redistribute them (or a database derived from them), honour ODbL: attribute OpenStreetMap and the Overture Maps Foundation, and share-alike any derived database. See the Overture license documentation for the canonical attribution text.