[OSM-legal-talk] Proposed "Metadata"-Guideline

[Alex Barth]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 5:41 PM, Steve Coast <steve at asklater.com> wrote:

>
> On Oct 9, 2015, at 3:22 PM, Alex Barth <alex at mapbox.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Steve Coast <steve at asklater.com> wrote:
>
>> If you want all these rights, you can just pick up the phone and pay HERE
>> or TomTom for them, they’d love to hear from you.
>
>
> What's more interesting than sending people to HERE and TomTom is making
> them contributors to OpenStreetMap, no?
>
>
> Absolutely, but at what cost?
>
> OSM solved 95% or 99% of our problems. Should we fundamentally change OSM
> to claim the last 1% so someone can make slightly more money or complete an
> academic project? I don’t think that’s a worthwhile tradeoff. I’m super
> happy with the 99% we achieved already.
>

I'm very happy about what we have achieved too. I don't think we're solving
95% of our problems with OSM though.

"our problems" would of course need more definition and I'm running the
risk here of misinterpreting what you said. I'm thinking about all the
cases where OSM isn't used yet, all the mapping that isn't happing in OSM
yet. OSM has the potential to fundamentally change how we capture and share
knowledge about the world but we aren't anywhere near the full impact we
should be having. 300,000 active mappers is impressive but the world is
much bigger. At a time where the internet that was supposed to be Open is
turning more and more into a closed game of big players and growth for OSM
is linear - what's our plan? Fixing the license surely can't be the extent
of our plan, but we need to be able to have a frank conversation about how
licensing is hurting use cases and engagement on OSM, without second
guessing people's intentions and without just showing them the door to
TomTom and HERE. In that context I find comparing ODbL to Public Domain
absolutely useful.

I think Stace's comments give a great glimpse into licensing pain points in
the academic community in the US and the guideline Simon pulled together is
going to fix some of the issues he's brought up. Having clarity how data
linked to OSM does not extend the ODbL's share alike to that data should go
a long way to address some of the concerns he raised.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/attachments/20151012/940a666b/attachment.html>