[OSM-talk] Users whose contributions are in the public domain

[Ted Mielczarek]

On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 6:36 AM, Vincent MEURISSE
<vincent.meurisse at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't understand why some users want their work in PD.
>  The goal of osm is to have a map of the world freely available for
>  anyone. But with PD someone (eg google) can take all the work of osm,
>  correct and complete it, and copyright it in a way that osm cannot
>  reuse the modification. So the copyrighted map will be better than the
>  free one.

And while they're taking the data, correcting and completing it, we'll
be continuing to update and improve our copy, so what have they
gained? Imagine if Wikipedia was public domain, and you made the same
argument there. Certainly one could take a complete copy of Wikipedia,
try to correct all errors, and publish it as your own work, but I
doubt you could ever truly create something better than the mass of
Wikipedia users.

For me, it seems ironic that a project spawned from licensing issues
over map data has found itself in a situation where licensing issues
are still a problem, and hopefully the license update will resolve
these and make using OSM data easier. Why else are we contributing
this data if not for people to *use* it?

-Ted