[OSM-legal-talk] license change effect on un-tagged nodes
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Thu Jul 7 07:58:24 BST 2011
Simon,
Andreas,
all,
when discussing these things with the person who goes by the
pseudonym of "John Smith", keep in mind that he is spending a lot of
time building/supporting an OpenStreetMap "fork".
The forkers, as I like to call them, are driven by all kinds of
motivations, the most benign probably being a sincere worry about data
loss - they believe that the license change is going to hurt OSM so much
that they must do all they can do retain a live copy of the "old OSM",
or even dissuade OSMF from changing altogether.
Now if it turned out that the license change went through like a breeze,
with very limited data loss that is patched up within weeks, they would
become a laughing stock - like the prophet without the doom.
While they started out wishing OSM to suffer the least possible damage,
their ego now forces them to demand the most rigid - even absurd - data
deletion policies for the license change lest they look like idiots for
starting a fork in the first place.
Needless to say, this interesting psychological situation is not a good
basis for a rational argument.
Or, to say it with fewer words: don't waste your time.
Bye
Frederik
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