On one hand, the reality of the situation is that we are a startup with a small hard-working team, trying to build something we think is important. With that comes operational cost for salaries, servers, office space etc. At the same time, we are strong proponents of Open Source and Open Data and feel we have a responsibility for sharing and contributing as much as we can.

In our discussions we went over many scenarios of users opting in, or opting out, to sharing specific photos or specific uploads. It never felt right. Complicated and contrived. Hard to explain.

We decided to go for something simple instead. Maximize sharing and use of all our photos without completely shooting us in the foot (head?) when it comes to making a sustainable future business. Something truly sustainable that will let us work on this challenging thing we love for many years to come.

Today we are happy to announce that all public photos on Mapillary are free to use for non-commercial work under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC).

Take a look at our legal summary page for the full details.

If you came here without knowing what Mapillary is, take a look at our manifesto.

Thanks!

While trying to sort out licensing, we have received a lot of feedback, questions, and comments over twitter, email, and our public GitHub issues, and really appreciated all of it. Lots of great advice from lots of smart people. Members of the Swedish and German OSM communities have been very supportive and helped a lot. Thanks everyone!

Now let's map this world.

Update: We are revising the license and going from CC-BY-NC to CC-BY-SA on April 29, 2014. See this blog post.