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

[Iván Sánchez Ortega]

El día Thursday 29 July 2010 11:22:20, mapping at sheerman-chase.org.uk dijo:
> I am specifically asking OSMF if they have any willingness to do [host the 
> PD servers].

I speak as a newly-appointed OSMF board member, not as the OSMF as a whole.

OSMF's resources are limited. Both money and sysadmin time. If you have a look 
at the DB and rendering server specs, you'll see they are high-end machines, 
and that 30 gigs of ram and 15 SAS drives don't come cheap. Not to speak 
about decent sysadmins, which are very hard to come by.

However, if you're willing to shell out 15K € and provide the necessary 
sysadmin time, I'm all up for letting you some rack space.

The real problem is not OSMF resources, but the ability to grab the attention 
of potential contributors. In my 3½ years of dealing with mapping agencies, I 
learned one important thing: pushing for a free license is hard. Very hard. 
Now, supporting two datasets with different licenses, and having to explain 
why to potential contributors? That's just nuts. The effort required for 
doing an import would easily go double or triple, just because of explaining 
the licenses and writing longer agreements with mapping agencies. 


So, money, sysadmin time, contributor attention span. I'm not going to 
sacrifice those in order to have a PD database.


> Since the purpose of OSMF is to support the mapping community, [...]

No, it's not. OSMF's purpose, and I quote from the Memorandum of Association, 
is to "encourage the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial 
data and to providing geospatial data for anybody to use and share."

It is my firm personal stance that:
- The way to encourage growth is to use share-alike.
- Thinning out OSMF resources and confusing potential contributors with two 
licenses instead of one is contrary to the goal of the OSMF.



Again, this is my opinion as a OSMF board member, not the opinion of the OSMF 
as a whole. 

Besides, OSM is a do-ocracy, so I urge you to set up a PD server (just like 
the USGS is doing). If you can grab the resources and people's attention, 
I'll just eat my words.


Yours,
-- 
Iván Sánchez Ortega <ivan at sanchezortega.es>

Un ordenador no es una televisión ni un microondas: es una herramienta 
compleja.