terms and conditions for using GTFS data model

[Melinda Morang]

Asking for bureaucratic reasons...

Suppose I were developing some commercial software that uses GTFS data.  I need to develop a data model for this software, and since it's meant to ingest GTFS and do stuff with it, I'd like to keep a one-to-one mapping with the GTFS specification as much as possible.  Are there any legal terms and conditions for the specification itself limiting my ability to reproduce the table and field names in my own data model?  I did not see any such thing in the GitHub repo.  The developers.google.com site has a link at the bottom to the Google Developers Site Terms of Service (https://developers.google.com/terms/site-terms).

The repo's README says "Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License." That statement does not appear on the reference.md page in GitHub, but it DOES in the developers.google.com version of that page (https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/reference/).

Any more concrete information or advice would be appreciated.

Melinda Morang

Product Engineer, Esri

[Brandon Martin-Anderson]

It's totally fine to convert a GTFS file to another format as long as you are permitted to produce derivative works from that GTFS feed. You would be permitted to produce derivative works from the GTFS feed as long as you have received an explicit license (by entering into an agreement like an EULA), an implicit license (which might be included with the feed), or the feed has been released into the public domain either explicitly by its creator or implicitly by being produced by an entity which is legally incapable of holding a copyright. (For example generally works produced by employees of the US government are ineligible for copyright protection.)

Point being: the authors of the GTFS spec have no part in that transaction.

-B

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Transit Developers" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to transit-develop...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Melinda Morang]

Thank you, but that does not answer my question.

My question is NOT "What am I allowed to do with any given GTFS dataset?"  My question is "Can I create a data model in a commercial product that is based on the GTFS specification itself?"  So, can my product use a published data model with some/all of the same table and field names as GTFS?  So, users using my product would be expected to transform their data into my data model, but my data model would be based heavily on GTFS.

~Melinda

[Sean Barbeau]

Melinda,

The short answer is yes, you can use the GTFS data model in your commercial product.

However, it's not clear if the current license from Google for GTFS is CC BY 3.0 or Apache v2.0.

If It's CC BY 3.0, you'd need to give Google Attribution as specified in:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

...but if it's Apache v2.0 then there are no obligations.

I opened this issue on Github to hopefully get clarification from Google, which has more details:

https://github.com/google/transit/issues/89

I'd suggest commenting there with any insight on why CC BY 3.0 might be restrictive for some companies, or why companies may prefer one over the other.

Sean