[OSM-talk] Yahoo Aerial Imagery vs. OSM Spirit

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

>> I recently asked on legal-talk whether they believed I could use  
>> available non-free aerial imagery to give examples in a "how to map  
>> complex junctions" documentation. Ine answer I received was: Even if  
>> you legally could, you shouldn't do it, as this would be against our  
>> spirit, because the imagery in question is not free.
> 
> What you can put on the wiki isn't really relevant.

That's exactly what the person told me: It is irrelevant whether you 
have a license (or right) to put the data on the wiki or not; either 
way, you damage the project by using non-free data.

> If you don't want to use the imagery, don't.

You're making this a private decision. I think that is very 
short-sighted. My argument was that using Yahoo data might compromise 
the project as a whole. If someone advocates tagging of segments, I will 
usually seek to stop them doing that - even if they're tagging at the 
other end of the world.

Say I released an OSM editor that provides Google imagery (strictly 
conforming to their terms of use - for the sake of argument, let us 
assume my editor was built on OpenLayers, and Google imagery was used as 
a background layer, which is 100% allowed).

I am sure many people would find this problematic as we do not have 
Google's ok to derive data from their imagery, and my editor would make 
it easy to do exactly that.

I would then answer: "If you don't want to use the imagery, then don't, 
but please to not tell others what they should do."

Doesn't sound like a good community decision making process to me.

Bye
Frederik

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