[OSM-talk] Re: privacy policy

[Nick Whitelegg]

O
>
> No for these users I don't think it's an issue to login. I think what
> others are interested in is making the process for less dedicated users
> much simpler and the need to login is a barrier to fully opening up and
> achieving simplicity for users. In the future users may not be focused upon
> map creation but on what extra things can be done using the map data as a
> basis.
>
> Andy
>

For those sort of reasons I do think there's a case for anonymous *read* 
access, rather than write.  Think of a client website or application making 
use of live OSM data for read-only purposes (ok not really practical now due 
to hardware constraints, but quite possibly in the future); users of such a 
third-party piece of software are probably not going to want to signup to OSM 
and login. I guess the provider of such applications could provide a proxy 
script with their login, saving the end user from needing to login, but it's 
not ideal.

That said, for the issues relating to copyrighted data, I think write access 
should continue to require a login.

Nick