[OSM-legal-talk] OS Opendata & the new license

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemed.net
Tue Sep 28 19:49:08 BST 2010


Kevin Cordina wrote:
> As to the usefulness - a map compiled from purely the OS streetview 
> data would serve one of my purposes for OSM data (rendering 
> nameless maps of streets and natural features) 100% perfectly, so 
> it is not a fair assumption that more data = more value.

If you want a nameless map of streets and natural features, just go straight
to the source and use OS VectorMap District. It's complete, consistent,
reliable, and has a sane licence. There's absolutely no point involving OSM.

I'm speaking from some experience here. Every month for our magazine I
produce a set of maps from OS OpenData (in this case Meridian2 rather than
VMD, because we're working at roughly 1:70,000 and Meridian2 is better
suited for that). I did once experiment with using OSM data. It was really
painful.

OSM's strength is in its rich data. Mindless tracing from OS StreetView, as
others have said, destroys the motivation of others to make the data rich.
I've seen this in Worcester, where an excellent quality map advancing at
moderate speed has now largely drawn to a halt after some thoughtless OS
tracing.

No-one gains from this. OSM gets a worse map in the medium (not even long)
term. Prospective users of the map data don't gain because they could have
used OS anyway. I guess the one use-case is short-term use in OSM-derived
products (such as Garmin .img files), but if one-tenth the effort spent on
tracing had been spent on a utility to intelligently merge OSM with
A.N.Other source without uploading it, that'd be much more sane.

OS StreetView is a useful tool in moderation, for checking your own
surveying and for filling in little gaps here and there. To get back to the
original point, I support efforts to make the Contributor Terms compatible
with this and other attribution-only licences. But some of the mindless
tracing really makes me weep.

cheers
Richard
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