[OSM-legal-talk] Phase 4 and what it means

[Mike Dupont]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 6:12 PM, Stephan Knauss <osm at stephans-server.de> wrote:
> On 05.06.2011 02:09, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>>
>> means for them. I know for a fact that among the current disagreeing
>> mappers there are some who intend to stay with OSM and who are just
>> holding out until the last minute; and I know there are some who simply
>> wanted to delay their decision until later.
>
> These have actively declined the license. What about all these mappers who
> can't be reached any more? Anonymous edits (uid=0)?
>
> I have some recent statistic of a comparably small community.
> For Thailand currently 31% of all contributors (that are still visible in
> the planet as last author) have not responded. Of these 162 mappers a quite
> large number of 41 (25%) has not contributed over the past two years. Quite
> likely they won't respond to the email ever.
> These edits sum up to 2,18 percent of the total nodes.
>
> I have the feeling that remapping this data has a lot less potential for a
> conflict than remapping data of a somewhat active contributor who recently
> declined but may change his mind.
>
> How to deal with these edits? What to advise in regard to abandoned
> accounts?

Frederik the great is only interested in remapping  Silesia
(Schlesien) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_the_Great#Warfare
and does not care about the data loss, leader loss or anything else.
He seems to be almost joyful in his statements about finally getting
rid of these pesky and annoying people so he can do what he wants, it
always amazes me to read his postings.

but seriously, the license team is not concerned about porting the
licenses to other jurisdictions, but once you have signed the new
contributor terms, they will not ever have to ask you again. This
process is about you giving up all your rights, not them doing
anything for it in return.

The quality of the license is poor, the support in the open source
community is next to zero, the fragmented nature of the documents is
annoying, there are many unanswered questions as well, the missing
compatibility with creative commons is a serious roadblock, the way
the whole thing is being managed is a disaster.

But once enough people have signed away their rights the license can
be changed at whim and adjusted so that it will mostly work, and if it
does not, tough luck.

We, the osm fork team are working on preserving your work and your
contributions under the existing license. I personally wish that the
leaders of OSM were not so "us against them", they are pushing people
out.  Osm fork now has the resources to host the tiles and also does
not have the bandwidth problems that osm does. The only thing that is
missing is a good rendering solution for drawing updates, we are
working on new software to do a better tiles at home to render in a
distributed fashion. When these things are in place your maps of
Thailand will not be lost, your data will be available and the tiles
will be usable also going into the future.

I wish that OSM was not so monolithic, but there does not seem to be
any compassion or understanding for allowing multiple tiles, multiple
license or multiple layers in osm proper. There is only one license,
one layer (ok two with cycllemap) and only one way, that way seems to
be pushed down on everyone.

What we really need is the ODBL to be a fork, an experiment that
should first work and then be an option, but the decision was made and
we cannot do anything about it.

With great sadness to I write these words and hope that you will all
have the strength and the courage to resist the pressure to give up
your rights and demand a fair treatment.

mike

-- 
James Michael DuPont
Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova and Albania
flossk.org flossal.org