[OSM-legal-talk] License Cut-over and critical mass

[Richard Weait]

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 12:18 PM, Kai Krueger <kakrueger at gmail.com> wrote:
[ ... ]
> And I think this thread alone has already shown (together with previous
> discussions) that there is a need for this discussion. E.g. Frederik said
> (paraphrased and exaggerated) it is about the data, not the contributors,
> then Richard comes and sais nearly the exact opposite (see the statements on
> talk-au for more details). So we aren't talking about 89.95% vs 89.96%, or
> other fine details, but about fundamental discrepancies of how this
> "critical mass" will be defined!

I believe you are referring to my assertion that community is more
important than data.  I said:

"My vision of OpenStreetMap sees the community, the contributors, as
very important; probably twice as important as the data, but perhaps
an order of magnitude more important."

I hope that was clearly my opinion, not policy of $anybody.  I respect
Frederik's opinion in many, many areas, but on this one I'll
respectfully try to use his own words against him.  (He'll probably
use additional information and relentless logic to vaporize me, but
here goes,)  It was at a State of Germany presentation by Frederik
that I learned that a huge amount of data in Germany is renewed /
edited every year.  What was that number, Frederik, 65%?  I think he
even joked that Germany could be reset, and remapped in about a year
and a half.

So you can replace data with a great community.

You might ignore community if you have a lot of data, but then you end
up with a lot of unsupported data that goes stale, nobody to build
cool tools like WheelMap http://wheelmap.org/ and a bunch of people
thinking, "If only we as a community could build a great, free map of
everything."

Kai, I don't mean to ignore the rest of your questions.  I'd like
certainty too.  Should the LWG back itself into a corner by saying x%,
y%, then ask forgiveness if the percentages look good but $region is
blanked?