[Talk-us] Excellent progress, u.s.

[Toby Murray]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 8:37 PM, Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/16/2012 9:18 PM, Alan Mintz wrote:
>>
>> At 2012-04-16 14:06, Nathan Edgars II wrote:
>>>
>>> Or you can simply add odbl=clean if there's nothing ungood about the
>>> object (e.g. it was split from a TIGER way and the splitting is
>>> something you would have done anyway).
>>
>>
>> Is this really sufficient? Can someone from the redaction squad comment?
>> Can I protect/"bless" a way or node and prevent its redaction simply by
>> (in good faith) adding this tag?
>
>
> We have no idea what rules the OSMF will use.

Well I won't claim that communication has been great but this
statement is a little over dramatic.

First of all: odbl=clean *will* be honored. If it is abused, it will
need to be handled just like any other form of copyright vandalism we
have dealt with in the past. Before adding it to a way you might need
to delete tags that were added by a decliner unless you can personally
verify the information in the tag from a license clean source in which
case you might want to add a note tag explaining this (I have used
odbl:note=*)

Also there is this:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/What_is_clean%3F

And of course the code is available for anyone to view... although I'm
not going to claim that this is really good documentation on the
matter:
https://github.com/zerebubuth/openstreetmap-license-change

There has been talk of the "v0 rule" which I believe is being
implemented in the code. This means that the act of creating an object
by a decliner doesn't automatically make it dirty. So if a way was
created by a decliner with the tag name=Fred and then someone else
added the tag highway=footway then after the bot gets done with it,
the way will still exist but only have the highway=footway tag. If an
accepting user changes the value of the name=* tag then it will be
clean... except, see the next paragraph. However if all of the way's
nodes are dirty and get removed then the way itself will have to go
too since you can't have a zero-node way.

Tag changes that are "trivial" will not affect the license status of
an object. Looking at the code right now I see it is checking
specifically for abbreviations/expansions. So a decliner changing
"Main St" to "Main Street" will not make a way dirty. On the flip
side, I believe an accepting user doing the same to a dirty tag won't
make the tag clean.

Unfortunately neither badmap nor OSMI fully implement all of these
rules so yes there is still far too much uncertainty. But there are
some facts to be had.

Toby