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Europa/Nuvolari/docs/licenses.md
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Alby96andClaude Opus 5 f3a0e3794a Narrow scope to radar, and put the app on a real OpenStreetMap base map
Drops forecasts, lightning, the home-screen widget and advertising. What
remains is radar on a map, the official ARPA alert bulletin, and rain
notifications.

The base map is now OpenFreeMap's Positron style: real OpenStreetMap vector
tiles with no API key, no registration, no request limits and commercial use
permitted. Every other free tier — MapTiler, Stadia, Jawg, Thunderforest —
needs a key, which is a secret to manage, a quota to outgrow and a signup to
complete before anyone can build the project, and the map is the one thing the
app cannot work without. Positron rather than Liberty or Bright because the
radar overlay has to be the loudest thing on screen, and a desaturated grey
base is built to sit under data.

Its style JSON carries no `attribution` field, so MapLibre displays no credits
by itself. The app renders them from the region config instead: the two
mandatory credits, OpenStreetMap and OpenMapTiles, go in the always-visible
bar, and OpenFreeMap's own credit — optional by their terms — is listed on the
Sources screen with the rest. The bundled offline style is still reachable with
MAP_STYLE_URL=offline, and still claims no base map attribution, because
crediting OpenStreetMap while showing it would be a false claim.

Radar-DPC stays the source. ARPA Piemonte's own radar remains a disabled stub
for two reasons that belong to the project owner, not to the code: the
real-time access link is only issued by email, and the open-data page states
the data is "gratuiti" and nothing else. Free of charge is not a licence, and
rendering those volumes into frames served from a CDN is redistribution. Both
questions go in the same email. An earlier draft of the docs recorded ARPA
radar as CC BY 4.0; the source page does not support that, so the claim is
removed rather than carried forward.

The documentation is updated throughout rather than annotated: CLAUDE.md gains
an explicit scope boundary, data-sources drops MET Norway and ISTAT and gains
the base map, licenses records that free of charge is not a licence, privacy
loses the whole advertising section, and the roadmap is renumbered so the
backend worker is next — until it exists, DpcRadarSource has nothing to read.

licenses.md keeps Open-Meteo and Blitzortung listed as excluded even though the
features that would have used them are gone: both are non-commercial-only, ads
are a plausible future, and neither should be adopted on the grounds that there
are none today.

Verified: analyze clean, 130 tests passing, and on the emulator the radar
overlay sits correctly over Piedmont on real OSM tiles with Turin, Milan and
Genoa labelled, the age reads "Aggiornato 4 minuti fa", and the Sources screen
lists all five credits with their licences.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-10 16:10:29 +02:00

3.9 KiB

Licenses and attribution obligations

Nuvolari redistributes third-party data. Every obligation below is binding: the Sources screen in the app must satisfy all of them, and none of them may be dropped to save screen space.

Summary

Data License Mandatory credit Notes
Radar-DPC rasters CC BY-SA "Radar-DPC" Share-alike propagates to our frames
ARPA Piemonte radar none stated Adapter disabled; see below
ARPA Piemonte alerts not stated "Arpa Piemonte" + link to the official bulletin Levels republished verbatim
OpenStreetMap data ODbL "© OpenStreetMap contributors" Must stay visible on the map
OpenMapTiles schema BSD 3-Clause "© OpenMapTiles" Must stay visible on the map
OpenFreeMap service MIT "OpenFreeMap" — optional Listed on the Sources screen

Share-alike is the constraint that shapes the backend

The Radar-DPC rasters are CC BY-SA. The PNG frames the worker produces — cropped, reprojected, colourised — are a derived product, so they inherit CC BY-SA. Practical consequences:

  • The published frames and manifest.json are CC BY-SA and must be labelled as such.
  • We cannot relicense them, and we cannot restrict their reuse.
  • The share-alike obligation covers the data, not the app's source code or UI.

The manifest carries its own attribution string for exactly this reason: the credit travels with the frames rather than being remembered at render time, and the app displays whatever the publisher of those frames says to display.

ARPA Piemonte radar: free of charge is not a licence

The ARPA open-data page describes the radar volumes as gratuiti and says nothing about reuse terms. That is not permission to redistribute. Rendering those volumes into frames and serving them from our CDN to app users is redistribution.

So the adapter stays disabled until ARPA states terms, and the email that requests the access link should ask for the reuse terms in the same breath. Both are the project owner's to obtain — see data-sources.md section 2.

An earlier draft of this file recorded ARPA radar as CC BY 4.0. The source page does not support that, so the claim has been removed rather than carried forward.

Base map credits are not automatic

The OpenFreeMap style JSON has no attribution field, so MapLibre displays nothing on its own. The app renders the credits itself:

  • the always-visible attribution bar carries the two mandatory credits;
  • the Sources screen lists all three with their licences and links.

The bar lists only what is actually on screen. With the offline fallback style there is no OpenStreetMap data being displayed, so crediting OpenStreetMap there would be a false attribution — the bar says "Mappa base non configurata" instead.

Advertising, and why it still matters here

The app currently carries no advertising, so it is not a commercial product today. Ads are a plausible future, though, and a source adopted now on non-commercial terms would have to be ripped out then. Prefer sources that permit commercial use.

This is why Open-Meteo's free tier and Blitzortung remain listed as excluded even though the features that would have used them are out of scope: both are non-commercial-only, and neither should be reached for on the grounds that there are no ads at the moment.

Naming and independence

The app must never appear to be an official ARPA or Protezione Civile product:

  • no ARPA/DPC logos, coats of arms or institutional branding;
  • never the word "ufficiale" applied to the app itself (the bulletin is official — the app is not);
  • the Sources screen carries an explicit disclaimer that Nuvolari is an independent app, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by ARPA Piemonte or the Dipartimento della Protezione Civile;
  • for civil-protection purposes the official channels always prevail, and the app says so next to every alert.