[Osmf-talk] a receding opportunity

[Robert Kaiser]

Frederik Ramm schrieb:
> Hi,
>
> On 10/01/12 10:54, Jaak Laineste wrote:
>>   Btw, have you noticed that Apple Maps "Sources" info lists OSM among
>> many others?
>
> Yes. The fact that Apple lists OSM but not the license (both the old and
> new license require that any user of the data points out which license
> it is under) has been mentioned on the Open Data Commons mailing list
> recently. This is technically a license violation but I think that most
> of us are happy enough to be mentioned at all.

Actually, and as others have already mentioned in this thread, it can be 
quite negative for us to be mentioned there - I also have been 
confronted with people who say "your data is quite bad, see how much bad 
press Apple gets for using it" and had to explain in length that almost 
everywhere the criticized data is actually from TomTom and other 
commercial map providers and not from us. (Apart from that, we are being 
criticized by people because Google has way more complete address data 
than us, but that's a different topic.)

I think it's bad for us that Apple mixed our data with commercial data 
and violating our license that they don't even link to. If we have any 
channel to them, we should ask them if there's any way they can correct 
that by either complying with our license or removing data derived from 
us. This shouldn't go via the media at first, but via a direct channel 
to them, if possible.

That said, I agree with Mikel on the original post, we have an 
opportunity here to promote OSM as a free (in terms of freedom) and 
collaborative alternative - where you don't have to be constrained by 
someone like Apple reducing the dataset and where you can correct errors 
and add details yourself.

Robert Kaiser