[Talk-GB] Licence redaction ready to begin

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hello all,

This is a special heads-up to the British and Irish mailing lists that 
the licence change bot is ready to get underway, starting in our areas.

Starting this week, we will be 'redacting' the contributions (less than 
1%) from the live database that are not compatible with the new 
Contributor Terms and Open Database Licence (ODbL). We are expecting to 
begin on _Wednesday_ (11th July) assuming a couple of final setup 
details are completed by then.

The bot will run with Ireland first of all, then the UK, then the rest 
of the world. Consequently please expect to see a few changes to your 
local area later this week.

There will be _no_ API outage and no other interruption to editing, but 
please do save your edits frequently to minimise the likelihood of 
conflict. Once the bot has finished the UK we'll send a further message 
to both these areas.

When the whole world is complete, we will be ready to distribute data 
under the ODbL and we'll advise of that with a separate announcement. 
The final pre-redaction dataset available under CC-BY-SA has now been 
generated at http://planet.openstreetmap.org/planet-120704.osm.bz2 . 
Where data has been redacted, any attempt to access it from the API or 
the site's 'browse' pages will return a response to that effect.

Test runs have shown that the bot is functioning as we want it to, but 
we will of course be monitoring its progress. We are currently expecting 
it to take in the order of one month to complete the whole world; given 
the many variables I'm afraid we can't give a more precise steer yet, 
but we'll aim to keep everyone updated as it runs.

As you know we were expecting this to start just after 1st April and the 
complexity of the task incurred the delay. Thank you all very much for 
your patience in waiting for it to get underway. Thank you especially to 
those who have contributed to the code, whether by patches, suggestions 
or just helping to firm up the workings.

Richard
for the OSMF board