[OHM] Moving Razed Railways to OHM – Legal and Technical Matters

[Michael Reichert]

Hi,

I am one of the developers of OpenRailwayMap and annoyed by the
reoccurring discussions [1] about abandoned and razed railways at OSM. We,
the developers of OpenRailwayMap think that people map these railways
just because ORM renders it (emails from US users confirm this as
their main motivation to map abandoned/razed railway infrastructure).

That's why we plan to turn off rendering of abandoned and razed
railways which are part of the OSM database. Instead, we plan to use
OHM as single data source for these features. We do not expect that
the OSM community will reach a consent.

I do not want to start just another discussion if abandoned/razed
railways should stay at OSM.

We do not have much knowledge how mapping at OHM works (we are
long-time OSM contributors and know our rendering stack, that's it).
That's why we are asking some questions:

Are there any legal implications we have to care about? Or can we
just announce a "Let's delete old railways at OSM and add them to
OHM?". (We do not want to make a (semi-)mechanical mass import)

Is it just enough to copy the tags 1:1 and add start_date=* and
end_date=*?

The history of the moved objects will be lost. Do you plan any methods 
preserve the history of moved objects? Or should user just add a link to 
their OSM changeset which deleted the objects if they upload the objects 
at OSM?

Best regards

Michael


[1] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2015-
April/014569.html https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2015-
August/073665.html http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=52711 
etc.