[OSM-talk] Abnormal votings on military objects in RU wiki part; PocketGIS madness

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Sat Apr 10 23:46:34 BST 2010


Komяpa,

   the OSM Wiki does not have a "binding" character. Winning or losing a 
vote does not mean that someone has the right to mass-delete data from OSM.

With near certainty it is not illegal for OSM to keep data about 
military installations in Russia on its servers.

It may or may not be illegal for Russians to map these installations; if 
it is illegal then don't do it. It may or may not be illegal for Russian 
Pocket Navigation software to display these installations; if it is 
illegal then don't do it.

But there is no reason and no legitimation to remove the stuff from OSM, 
no matter what the outcome of a vote on the matter is. You are welcome 
to explain this to those who seem to have made it their goal to "win" 
the vote.

> Second, those strange votes come from PocetGis users community (a
> proprietary traffic-jam-aware software for WinCE, that uses OSM data),
> which had a "solidarity vote on the problem", when the lead developer
> asked everyone "please vote thsi way for our project to live".

Really, if they believe that their project will be harmed by showing 
Russian military installations then they should not do it. If they are 
using standard OSM tiles then they should stop doing so, and render 
their own tiles without military installations.

As a project we explicitly allow proprietary projects and commercial 
enterprises to use our tiles (provided they don't make undue amounts of 
traffic). But if they start to delete things from our data they do not 
want on their map, just because they cannot afford to render their own 
tiles, that's something we will not accept.

(Can anybody confirm whether the CloudMade style editor can be used to 
create a style that ignores military landuse? If yes then that would be 
an option that costs them nothing.)

> Also, they (vctos, the lead developer) started some strange topics on
> "What is in OSM? Democracy or anarchy? Let here be our democracy".

OSM is not a democracy, and does not aspire to be one.

> He
> says that now the community is controlled by a number of hackers and
> wants a voting on strict rules and positions, who will do what.
> Seemingly, to be the key person in osm-ru (http://tinyurl.com/ya4tjcc)

He can set up a Russian chapter of the OSMF and try to get elected 
number one. The OSMF is more or less democratically organised and 
expects the same from local chapters. However, neither OSMF nor local 
OSM chapters have a say in what goes in the database and what doesn't, 
with the exception of very few cases where the project itself might be 
endangered because of edit wars or copyright violations.

> If there's somebody who can stop that madness, please do it. Or at
> least vote in that voting.

I'd say we just ignore them. If they do damage, we revert.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"




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