[Talk-us-massachusetts] 2015 ortho licensing, thank-you text

[Greg Troxel]

I've been having a brief offlist discussion with Peter about details of
the MassGIS page, which he has *massively* improved lately, and I've
added a few typos :-) A few notes from my end.

The page is at

  https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/MassGIS

1) I asked MassGIS about the 2015 orthoimagery and licensing given the
odd "not redistributable" language.  The imagery cannot be redistributed
but it is entirely ok to use it for editing OSM.  Also the CC-BY label
is a website artifact, and the wiki page now notes this.  So I think we
are now documented as clearly ok to use all MassGIS data.

2) I have submitted the LIDAR hillshade layer to the Editor Layer Index.
When that succeeds I'm going to submit the MassGIS basemap.  Peter and I
think that's a good stopping place; we can wait a bit and discuss here
if anything else should get added (2019 Orthos and L3 parcels are
already there).  More layers add confusion and it's not clear other
layers beyond these 4 are truly useful to normal people editing.

3) I took the liberty of speaking for all us in expressing our
appreciation for the data being under a compatible license, because I
believe that is obviously the consenus view and uncontroversial.  Please
feel free to speak up here or to me privately if you think I shouldn't
have done that.  I plan to send the link to my MassGIS contact tomorrow
afternoon -- my impression is that they find it useful to be able to
point to good things that happen because of their data, and amazingly
state websites use OSM instead of the MassGIS basemap. Also, I would
like to show them the courtesy of making sure that our description of
their terms is accurate.

4) If you haven't checked out the LIDAR layer at least scroll down and
look at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuse, which has WWII
history clearly visible.  (Thanks pete@ for adding this, and I'm glad
you thought this was cool too.).  FWIW, I know someone who went around
chekcing blackout shades during hhe war, and saw a talk by people whose
land was seized in 1942 to create this ammunition storage facility.