[Legal-general] question re. OSMF's attitude to hosting alternative licence servers

[Nic Roets]

Tim,

PD is my preferred license.

But I'm only in favour of forking if someone (USGS ?) makes a very
large donation:
1. Hardware. Not just duplicate the OSMF servers, but also provide
servers for fringe projects like All-In-One Garmin maps, tagwatch and
the bots.
2. Man-hours. If you look at the lists, you will see a lot of things
that require manual intervention, for example last week's planet dump
that had to be restarted. Perhaps you can overcome some of the
problems by buying better hardware. You can certainly wait for osm.org
to fix all the major bugs. But some effort will still be required.
3. New software to detect data that can be transferred from PD to
org.osm and tools to do the actual transfer.

And for what really ? OSM is becoming so complete that the need to mix
it with other data sources is quite small. When you do want to mix it
with other sources, there is often a technical or legal way around it.

Regards,
Nic

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 1:35 PM, TimSC <mapping at sheerman-chase.org.uk> wrote:
> Attn: OSMF board, SteveC, and everyone really,
>
> Another question which has probably been discussed, but I am asking to be
> brought up to speed (again):
>
> What is OSMF's attitude to hosting other servers under different license
> regimes? According to the server wiki page, there are unused hardware but I
> would not be surprised if they might be needed if other hardware fails.
> Given this mailing list is hosted on OSMF hardware, I suppose you cannot be
> completely against it. Obviously, additional servers have the potential
> problem of fragmenting and complicating the OSM landscape. How do plan to
> balance the project's cohesiveness against the (rather unquantified) demand
> for PD or a CC-BY-SA fork?
>
> Or are you going to see how relicencing of major imports are going to go?
> This could have a major impact for the demand for alternative licenced
> servers, so we might want to avoid acting precipitously.
>
> I saw in the legal-general mailing list, Landon has been investigating other
> hosting possibilities, which we should not ignore either. I am interested in
> the rails port approach, btw.
>
> TimSC
>
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