[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] NearMap Community Licence and OSM Contributor Terms

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

SteveC wrote:
> It's holding the past data hostage I don't personally feel is very cool.

Agree that it isn't cool but then again everyone is doing it - i mean 
how often have read "I am against the license, if you go ahead then 
prepare to delete <X>". Makes me want to go there and throw the data out 
right now & replace it with my own ;) - sadly not on the cards for 
Australia.

I think we're all at fault here because when NearMap images became 
availalbe for tracing, the whole license change process was already in 
motion and the imports page on the Wiki already had the warning about 
checking compatibility. It should have been *us* who asked NearMap at 
the time "and what about future license changes?" and if their response 
had been "we'll investigate whatever license you want to move to and 
then tell you if you can keep the data that you traced" (and I'm sure it 
would habe been that), we should just have said "thanks but no thanks".

Instead we all went drooling "ooooohh look you can map individual towels 
on the beach".

I think this should be lesson for using any kind of external source in 
the future. It is unfair to blame NearMap - they can hardly be 
criticised for giving us something under a certain license and then 
sticking to it.

Do we have an idea how much data we're talking about in the particular 
case of Nearmap? Surely the Australian community has put proper Nearmap 
source tags on changesets or objects; has anyone counted them yet?

Bye
Frederik

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