Licences and attribution
Waymeld is built on other people's work. This page says what it uses, what it uses it for, and where the terms are. It names sources and links to their licences rather than restating them — a paraphrased licence is wrong in some detail and looks authoritative, which is worse than a link.
Data
The two datasets Waymeld could not exist without.
- OpenStreetMap
- The basemap, and everything Waymeld reads about the ground: surface, difficulty, access, and the roads and paths every generated connector is built from. Route intelligence and the composer both rest on it entirely.
- Open Database Licence (ODbL) 1.0
- Copernicus DEM GLO-30
- Elevation. Every climb figure Waymeld reports is measured from this, read from the AWS Open Data mirror. It is a surface model rather than a terrain model — it includes tree canopy — which is why the elevation pipeline smooths and thresholds rather than summing raw differences.
- Free of charge under the Copernicus DEM terms, with attribution required
Software
Self-hosted, and not modified.
- GraphHopper
- The routing engine, self-hosted. Six custom profiles decide what each activity may legally and sensibly ride.
- Apache License 2.0
- Photon
- Address search, self-hosted. Its data is OpenStreetMap, so the ODbL entry above governs the addresses it returns.
- Apache License 2.0
- PostGIS
- Answers every geometric question that has to be authoritative, on top of PostgreSQL, which stores everything. Named as one entry because Waymeld depends on the pair, and linked to PostGIS because that is the part it depends on FOR something.
- GPL v2; PostgreSQL under the PostgreSQL Licence
- Manrope and Space Mono
- The two typefaces, self-hosted rather than fetched. Numbers are set in Space Mono throughout, which is how a measured figure stays distinguishable from prose at a glance.
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
What you may do with somebody else's route
A route another rider has published is theirs. Waymeld claims no ownership of it, grants no licence over it, and does not ask them to give one up. To publish, they confirm they have the right to share it; that confirmation is recorded with a timestamp, and it is a statement by them and not by Waymeld.
In practice: ride it. Download it, put it on your device, use it to plan. What publishing does not grant is redistribution — republishing somebody else's track elsewhere, or including it in a product, needs their permission rather than ours. Where a route names a licence, that licence governs; where it says unknown, no onward permission has been given and the uploader retains their rights.
A rider cannot yet choose a licence for a route when publishing it, which is why so many say unknown. That is a missing feature, not a claim about the route.
Where the credit appears, and one place it does not
- On the map — in the map's own attribution control, on every view.
- In GPX exports — in the file's metadata, wherever the export contains OSM-derived geometry. A track you recorded yourself does not carry it, because it is not OSM-derived and claiming otherwise would be wrong in the other direction.
- In TCX exports — the same, in the course notes.
FIT exports carry no attribution. The format has no field for one that any device or application displays, and putting it in the course name would corrupt a field limited to sixteen characters. So the credit is absent rather than hidden: if you need a file that carries it, export GPX or TCX, which do.
What Waymeld stores about you, why, and for how long is a separate question, answered by the processing register in the repository — and everything it describes can be exported or deleted from your account.