[OSM-legal-talk] The Copyright of Split Ways

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 01/28/2012 11:08 PM, FK270673 at fantasymail.de wrote:
> Thank you very much for the wise decision to postpone the license change until all open problems are solved.

"Citation needed"?

> Generally,
> - if the second-oldest node of a way is older than the way itself, the way probably was split. Its v1 belongs to the changeset where the second-oldest node was created.
> - if the second-oldest node of a way is younger than the way itself, the way was probably re-created by other mappers and cannot be considered "property" of the v1 mapper. Thus, it would make sense to assign copyright ownership to the v3 mapper (who has contributed the second-oldest node).

There's no reason for such vodoo logic. A way split or merge can be 
determined from looking at a changeset. A changeset in which a chain of 
nodes is removed from one way and added to another, new way denotes a 
split. It is possible to determine these automatically, without 
comparing the date of nodes; the only difficulty is that it requires 
looking at a full history file sorted by changeset rather than by object 
ID which means that considerable processing is required, for an outcome 
that is worth relatively little.

I'm sure it is going to be tackled one way or the other but it really 
isn't the big issue some people seem to make of it. Splitting ways is a 
common thing but it is only relevant for the license change if an agreer 
splits a way created by a decliner and vice versa. There are simply not 
so many cases of that to warrant all the brouhaha that is made.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"