[OSM-talk] Osmarender 5

[Frederik Ramm]

80n,

> When you signed up to OSM you will have been presented with this
> statement:

>    "By creating an account, you agree that all work uploaded to
>    openstreetmap.org and all data created by use of any tools which connect
>    to openstreetmap.org is to be licensed under this Creative Commons license
>    (by-sa)."

Sure you want to go down that route? 
The CC-BY-SA license says:

"Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by
the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they
endorse you or your use of the work)."

I hereby specify that you must attribute my work in the following
manner: "Do not embed my user name in maps produced; either omit it, or
list in in a textual appendix to the map."

I'm saying this tongue-in-cheek since it was you who started pointing
me at the "letter of the license". I don't acutally mean to enforce
this license just yet it but you should be aware that as things
currently stand, it is the licensor and not the licensee who decides
what attribution to use.

We have gotten around attribution until now on the grounds that it was
not feasible. If you start to suggest that it could be feasible, then
people will expect you to do it right, and that's opening a can of
worms to me.

>    With respect to your second point, it is the API that is at fault here. 
>    If the API provided a list of all the contributors for each way then t at h
>    could also provide the appropriate attribution.  Its the API that needs
>    fixing then the right thing can be rendered.

No it cannot, because it does not necessarily know. 

Even if you were to collect all authors of all nodes and segments used
by a way, which would be an absolute performance nightmare, you would
still miss out some. For example, if you split a way, this is not a
"native" operation to our data model; to the API this looks like one
way shortened, another created. The new way will not inherit the
history of the old one, but copyright-wise of course the original
authors are part of it.

If you draw a motorway, but only one direction, and I later add the
other direction as a way in its own right but without referring to my
own GPS track or an aerial image, my way is, in terms of licensing,
surely a "derived work" of yours. Being very strict I could but that
in the "source" tag, but I don't think anyone will do it... the fact
that my way is based on yours will remain unknown to the API.

All these things can be fixed, and I assume your "experiment" is aimed
at encouraging people to think more about the licensing and
attribution stuff when developing OSM software. I'd much rather have
everbody sign a "it's ok if OSM is attributed instead of me
personally" statement and then do away with all this bean counting.

Bye
Frederik

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