[Legal-general] Introduction

[Sunburned Surveyor]

I meant to send the message below to the mailing list, not just to Eric.

Eric wrote: "This is how it works now. Because of the license, OSM is
able to "pull" data from the USGS at will. There is no incentive to
"push" data upstream because we cannot get anything back. Money (tax
dollars) spent developing any "push" would be very contentious -
almost as bad as if the USGS were to spend money pushing data to
Google or TeleAtlas."


I think we may be looking at this backwards. Let me explain.

Right now, I don't give any of my volunteer geospatial data to the
USGS because there isn't a good mechanism to do so. I just upload my
stuff to OSM. That means (at this point in time) the USGS is getting
none of my stuff and relatively no benefit from OSM.

If, instead, the USGS set up a mechanism where I could give them my
volunteer geospatial data, after which it was uploaded to OSM, the
USGS is getting my stuff, and OSM gets it too. The reason it has to go
to the USGS first is to avoid "license contamination" by OSM. But at
the end of the day the USGS gets the data they aren't getting now.
Instead of getting it from OSM they get it from the mappers directly.

That may not be as easy as getting a data dump directly from the OSM
database, but I think this method of getting data into the USGS
directly from the mapper instead of from OSM can be turned into a
benefit. The USGS will be more interested in quality control and
metadata than most OSM folks, and it will be able to implement some
more oversight/quality control measures if it chooses to. I know OSM
has a "free spirit", but I think a lot of folks like myself wouldn't
mind going through a couple extra checks when we contribute data. This
is sort of how the National Map Corps worked.

At the end of the day the USGS would have a repository with a good
percentage of the data present in OSM, only it would be of better
quality.

The USGS doesn't even have to push up to OSM if it doesn't want to.
Someone at OSM could suck up the data from the USGS repository.

I'd start uploading data to a PD repository administered by the USGS
tomorrow. It is going to take a lot longer than that to effect any
license change in OSM, if that is even possible.

Take your lemons and make lemonade. :]

Landon