[Openstreetmap] The bigger picture

Frank Mohr f_mohr at yahoo.de
Wed Feb 15 11:49:14 GMT 2006 

I started this mail as a reply to the first "bigger picture"
and now i try to express my concerns to some of the mails that
came in later
I'll structure my mail with pseudo-quotes

>
> ===
>

As a start, let me tell you how i came into this (might get a
bit longer, but it explains some of my concerns)

several years ago, my parents took part in some kind of annual rally.
since i can remember (very long time) this follows the same rules:
- you get a booklet with the description of 12 destinations.
- each destination is more or less paraphrased
- you have half a year to go to each destination and get a stamp there
- there is no restriction how you find the destination
(main goal is to learn more about your wider surrounding area)

one evening my mom called me as they couldn't solve one destinations
with a geographic riddle. (something about 2 rivers and a mountain
as far as i remember)
At this time i had xrmap (http://frmas.free.fr/li_1.htm#_Xrmap_)
on my system with map data from the "CIA World data bank II"
that showed just nothing in the search area.

that made me curious and i started to seach for more data and
other software.

the result was (for Europe, for the USA and Canada the situation
is different)

- there is a lot of free (FOSS) GIS, mapping and routing software
  for Linux/Unix
- free (in both senses) data is rather limited
  - if you get data for a larger area, it's at large scale
  - sometimes you get really detailed data, but thats only
    for testing purposes and for some small areas
  - at that time, there where some few projects with free
    detailed geo data (Frida/BBBike)
  - some free programs (ex. GPSdrive) use bitmap data from
    commercial but freely accessible web services, while
    the licence situation is unclear
- all data you get at a reasonable price can only be used be the
  "windows only" software it comes with and most of the software
  can't be used with wine on linux
  (bought some "previous version/year before" streetmap packages
  cheap on ebay and most of them showed rather strange results)
- data you get in a documented format is far to expensive
  (just the city of Frankfurt was at about several 10k €)

at that point i was thinking about a different way to
get better data

i ended up in
- use a GPS to get data
- provide a framework for people to share data
- provide the city i live in for others
- hope that other people provide data for areas i need
- use some GPL like licence for the data
(sounds just like OSM that wasn't there at that time)

the goals where to
- provide data for FOSS developers to do something like
  roadmap for Europe, give them vector data instead of
  bitmap backgrounds for programs like gpsdrive,
  extend the scope of BBBike to my area etc.
- provide people with free data to draw maps for websites
  or publications (with the thought to use that also as
  some kind of advertising to attract more people to the project)
  as there where several cases of people that got reminders by
  lawyers for using map images of free (like beer) webservices
  on there pages (in Germany the person who gets the reminder
  has to pay the lawyers costs and thats calculated depending
  on the assumed high damage by the wrongdoing)
- as an "ultimate goal" - scratch at the monopoly of digital
  map distributors and the monopoly of MS as a desktop OpSys
  by providing just another desktop application to alternative
  Operating Systems

while gathering data, i was looking for similar projects
and found
- FREEMAP (http://www.freemap.nett.org/)
  they tried the same for Oslo, but that project seems
  to have stopped in 2000
- Sandspur
  (http://www.peter-roosen.com/index.php?page=Projekte/Sandspur)
  had some discussion to find out about the intended licence
  but i found that too restrictive to attract the needed
  number of people

some times later i found OSM with just the same idea of
proceeding and licence.

>
> === The licence discussion
>

We already had the licence discussion in Jan. last year
The licence proposals went from "public domain" to "CC-SA-NC"

My personal opinion is still that free geodata needs a special
licence, that covers things like printed maps or created
bitmap images, but neither FSF nor CreativeCommons have the
resouces to create one (at least when i talked to some
representative last June), but both organisations see the need
for a special licence.

just to repeat some thoughts about the different licences:

* public domain
  isn't possible in Germany and probably other countries
  as you can't give away your "moral right", you can only give
  away "rights of use" and "rights of distribution"

* BSD like
  my personal concern about this is that "the big guys"
  just take the data and hide the required attribution
  somewhere in "about" or the documentation
  (just remember how the BSD-TCP stack and tools came into
  Win-NT and Win 3.11)

* GPL
  whould have been my first choise, but it was written for software,
  not data.

* CC
  same concerns as BSD

* CC-SA
  for me thats the best compromise

* CC-SA-NC
  think it's hard to draw a line, whats commercial and what isn't
  - distribute the data as a commercial product - think that clearly is
  - distribute the data as part of a commercial product
    - that forbids Linux distributors like SuSE or RedHat or
      BSD CDROM distributors to include the data
  - use the data to draw maps in commercial advertising - clearly is
  - use the data on a navigation system in a busines car or
    in a private car on a business trip (big question mark)


>
> === OSM as a commercial product
>

there are several reasons for me to object against making OSM commercial

* the history - most of us came to OSM to create free (in both senses)
  geodata. i assume eCourier also contributed the data with this
  assumption
* the current coverage is much to small to be successfuly used as
  commercial product

* my personal situation
  - as stated above my idea was and is to create a free dataset
  - to participate in a commercial project (for-profit or not)
    has fiscal impacts
  - the permission to participate by my company is limited to
    not-for-profit "hobby" projects

>
> === funding OSM
>

Just a few ideas to collect money

* most bigger opensource groups like the FSF collect donations
  and use this money to sponsor projects
* Add a way to give direct donations to the wiki and the start page
* As someone proposed in another mail, we could add some kind of
  "create a map image of a certain area to be used on websites"
  and this page shold have a donation link

personally i'm willing to give some money to buy hardware
and to pay hosting.

Hardware

I'm currently talking to people at my company to get some
used hardware we have in our two old testing data centers
and that will not be moved to the consolidated new test
environment. (the hardware is currently for a limited time
listed to be requested by other departments, after this time
i can get some for a fixed price depending on
processor speed/memory/disk space)




	

	
		
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