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

[kevin at cordina.org.uk]

Which would be true if I had the technical ability to render the data.  I don't.  However, some kind soul has written a renderer for OSM data that does it for me.  The other advantage is that as I develop an area to include footpaths they also appear.

Thank you for categorising my many hours of input as mindless.

We have rather gone off topic of the legal questions of whether the new licences/CTs allow import, and how the affect things.  On this topic, to parody someone else's acronyms, I am an Intellectual Property lawyer, and have strong views, but there seems little point in contributing based on the treatment given to people making correct, but unpopular points (I.e. They're ignored).

Kevin

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-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net>
Sender: legal-talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:49:08 
To: <legal-talk at openstreetmap.org>
Reply-To: "Licensing and other legal discussions."
	<legal-talk at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] OS Opendata & the new license


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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