[OSM-talk] Fwd: Osmarender 5

80n 80n80n at gmail.com
Sun Sep 2 10:15:28 BST 2007


On 9/2/07, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
>
> 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)."


Good point.

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."


You chose to make your user name public.  Do you want to rescind that now?
Those who have not made their user name public will not have their names on
the map.

(FWIW I think this public setting should be reversible.  Obviously it cannot
be rescinded for names that are already in a planet file somewhere, but it
would mean that all future edits were no longer public which must have some
value.)


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.


It will be somewhat impractical if everyone wants a different form of
attribution, but you are right - that is exactly how it is at them moment.


> 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.


No, we have just ignored the requirement and violated the license terms of
all our users.  It is demonstrably feasible and people should expect us to
do it right.


>    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,


It would not be a performance problem if the copyright was just stored as a
tag containing a list of authors.   The clients (or preferably the server)
could automatically add to the list each time it was updated by a new
author.


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.


The new way would inherit the copyright tag of the old way.


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.


People already spend far too much time *thinking* about licensing.  My
experiment is more about *doing* something about it.



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