[OSM-legal-talk] Contact Info For Tom Hughes Regarding Public Domain Mailing List

[Sunburned Surveyor]

Tom,

You wrote: "No, but some of us are trying to work to achieve the best consensus
possible within the existing project while others appear to be trying to
fragment the project."

I don't think there has been a decision by any of us to "fork" OSM or
to "fragment" the community. I believe there is a group of people
interested in OSM that would like to discuss the ways we might
incorporate (and preserve) public domain data into OSM. Although the
idea of a separate (mirrored) software stack has been mentioned, no
firm decision has been made by any group to move in this direction. I
would personally oppose this approach because of the hostility it will
generate from other OSM members. I think a scenario in which OSM uesrs
can choose to upload there data to a public domain repository before
feeding it to the main OSM database and subjecting it to a "viral"
license will be very workable. There won't be any fork of OSM in this
case, just a place where people like myself can go to get OSM data
that is under the public domain.

Let me explain why this is important:

Let's say my comany is hired to build a GIS for a small irrigation
district in Central California. I convince my boss that it would be
great if we could collect our transportation data layer and contribute
it to OSM. He agrees to let me do this.