[talk-au] Active Australian OSM contributors in light of CT/license changes

[Andrew Harvey]

Thanks for the responses. So it seems there will be some fragmentation. Some
are moving to fosm, some are moving elsewhere, some are staying with OSM,
some have stopped actively contributing and are on hold... I wrote this mail
for two reasons, to get a sense of where local contributors stand, but also
to raise some awareness for anyone with their head still in the sand who may
have been ignoring the issue or holding out for everything to magically fix
itself.

For those whom will be staying with OSM, I still value your contributions;
fosm tries to merge your changes in. In the future as the branches become
feather apart it may prove more difficulty (i.e. more duplicated work), but
I guess we'll have to deal with that as it comes.

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 10:35 PM, Chris Barham <cbarham at pobox.com> wrote:

> and the multiple forks of OSM may have ignored the advice to only fork
> "When you have exhausted all other options."
>

I believe we have "exhausted all other options." there have been multitudes
of debate to try to resolve the issue mostly going nowhere.

 Forks are not a guaranteed success.  They may have good reasons,
> ideals and differing opinions, but the parent project has a brand, and
> for OSM it's a powerful one.
> As an example everyone has heard of MySQL, but what about Maria?
> Mysql - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysql#Forks_of_MySQL
>

I don't see this as a problem. OSM is much more than just the database (it's
the schema, the reputation, the software and tools, the API/data format),
and we are just replacing the database contents. The more mainstream, well
known and used OSM as a whole project becomes, the better off and OSM
database forks will be because the shared parts will improve for both of us.

 Personally I don't care about the licence.  I feel that the forks and
> this resulting dilution of effort will become a drain on all the
> projects (united we stand/divided etc etc), and have become a shouting
> match where the 'political' goals of the forked projects are trumpeted
> over the stated reason for the thing being there - an open map.  Cries
> of "We're more open" don't help when you
> can't rustle up the hosting fees or development volunteers.  So a fork
> must become popular.  More popular than other forks or the parent
> project.  Was this the real reason for your post with mention of FOSM
> (and no other OSM spin-offs), and seeding "fear uncertainty and doubt"
> regarding *possible* data deletion.. you were recruiting?
>

I mention fosm because it is the only CC-BY-SA fork I am aware of. A
CC-BY-SA fork is a defensive action, preserving the current state. Any other
forks are pro-actively changing the status quo. Such forks can happen any
time and are independent of the current change of terms of OSM.

I'd like to think all this rather dull licence bickering will play out
> and OSM will continue and strengthen.  It's sad that people with
> agendas are talking up the 'possible' deletion of data, and rushing
> off to fork.  That energy could have been used towards working on ways
> of keeping or replacing the data in OSM.  A satisfactory local example
> where things turned out well is where Nearmap made it's generous offer
> to allow pre-existing data to remain under the new licence.  However
> on this list there was little rejoicing, there was a lot of picking
> over the actual wording of their offer; looking at the legal-eze,
> hairsplitting terminology or imagined loopholes in order to justify
> the fork projects existence.
>

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 8:06 AM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 7 July 2011 07:54, Mark Pulley <mrpulley at lizzy.com.au> wrote:
> > How could I add CC-BY-SA derived data if I use GPS traces, audio
> recordings
> > of names, or imagery like Yahoo or Bing? The only way I could see this
> > happening would be if I was to deliberately go out of my way to add a
>
> Actually it's potentially trivial to use CC-by-SA data, since anyone
> that supplied contributions under cc-by-sa are still in the database
> and you only have to modify previous data to then have data derived
> from cc-by-sa
>

Yes, if you modified or built upon any data already in OSM. The data is
CC-BY-SA, hence your modifications must be CC-BY-SA also, unless of course
you know the data to be public domain, or have obtained it under a different
license elsewhere.

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 9:10 AM, David Murn <davey at incanberra.com.au> wrote:

> 3) Ive made a couple of edits, but really am feeling like theres so much
> duplicated work now that its almost just not worth bothering
>

The more who contribute directly to fosm rather than OSM, the less the work
there will be for fosmers dealing with duplicated data resulting from
merges. If it becomes a big problem, I think we should be able to do manual
merges of OSM data into fosm, assuming we have the volunteers. Otherwise we
can just leave OSM data behind if no one is longer to merge it into fosm.
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