[OSM-talk] advertising

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> Having said that, I do have some concerns. As a community we need to see 
> some more about the Foundation controlling the servers that house our 
> data and control how the world views this data. 

An more modern alternative to "trying to get the foundation to represent 
what the community wants" might be "trying to eliminate centralism as 
much as possible".

Now this is again something that's way in the future technically, but 
imagine for a moment we didn't have a central database; imagine our data 
was somehow "floating" in a kind of peer-to-peer network. Anyone could 
set up a server that accepts changes and distributes them, of course 
there would be conflicts and there would need to be ways to resolve 
them; there would not be "one single truth" but perhaps a few of them. 
There wouldn't be a "central" website where you have to log on.

Today the data is open and the license makes it impossible for anyone, 
even if he controls the server, to take published data away again; but 
still the server operators have considerable power, e.g. designing the 
web page, being able to deny or revoke user accounts, etc. (they also 
might have the *obligation* to exercise those powers in some cases to 
avoid legal threats).

Distribution of "current" data for readonly purposes has started with 
the planet file; we will no doubt see distribution of live data and 
maybe even history data for readonly purposes. Distribution of data for 
read/write purposes, and maybe even relinquishing the "master server" 
idea altogheter, is a wholly different beast.

But maybe, since many of us are rather technically minded, it is more 
satisfying to work towards this goal than working towards some complex 
legal entity that somehow channels the community's wishes and controls 
the Holy Openstreetmap Master Database accordingly...

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'