[OSM-talk] Resign as a secretary (was: The long tail)

[Immanuel Scholz]

Hi,

I hereby resign as my (not yet elected anyway) position as a OSMF-secretary.

There are too much differences in the understanding of "free" between
Steve and me.

I am not yet sure whether I will be active in the rest of the OSM
community or not. (But if not, JOSM sources/binaries will be available for
a long time for anyone to grab and continue my work).


> In a private email, Imi sent this which he's agreed I can publish:
>
>>> Then there are the bad server performance problems.
>>> Next was, that there are privacy issues.
>>> Then some concerns about forking projects came up.
>>> Now you say that you are threatened by the gouvernment to close down
>>> the server. When asked for evidence you just answer that we all agree
>>> with you anyway.
>
> Which are the reasons he thinks I'm mad, and he also thinks that I'm
> trying to control the database and not release it.

Steve came up with other excuses every time I asked for a database dump. I
didn't said he is mad, but accused him of lying and not giving out the
database for false excuses.


(Now we can add a new item to the list: "But you all know that
distributing the data is bad - think of the bicycle-webcam-example." 
Sorry, but I cannot stand this crap anymore.)



>>> Next was, that there are privacy issues.
>
> Yes. There are deep privacy issues. I used to volunteer for an
...
[long stuff about CCTV, bicycles and why we would not want to make the
data open]
...

Sorry, but bullshit.

All contributors released their data under the terms of CC-by-sa.

"...Licensor hereby grants You a ... license to exercise the rights in the
Work as stated below:
- to reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work into one or more
Collective Works, and to reproduce the Work as incorporated in the
Collective Works;"

So by uploading the data, everybody WANT the data to be free. Also please
do not say that we originally should not want to distribute it for some
political reason you made up with your prof.


[long stuff about a mail full of copyrighted postcodes]

So what? Only because you received a mail from someone unknown full of
copyrighted data, you conclude that it must be OS guys?

Maybe it was someone want to help you, sent you data he found and got awed
because he didn't realized it was illegal to do so? Maybe not..

Anyway, projects like this will always have to live with people submitting
copyrighted data. (That's one of the problems distributing planet.osm
without information about specific data origin - if something is
corrupted, you have to delete the whole planet.osm).


Ciao, Imi.