[OSM-talk] Ordnance Survey tries to reinforce its stranglehold over "derived" geographic data in the UK

[Donald Allwright]

>From today's Guardian:
>
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/20/ordnance-survey-google-maps
>
>(not reference to OpenStreetMap towards the end).
>
>and the letter from OS which provoked it:
>
>http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/docs/use-of-google-maps-for-display-and-promotion.pdf
>
>David

This move is quite concerning, but underlines the need for OpenStreetMap to exist in the first place. I wonder if we should respond with some sort of marketing campaign, aimed at local authorities and other public institutions, to encourage them to use OpenStreetMap as the basis for their future mapping needs. In fact we should maybe even offer to complete surveys in a particular area of any types of data that are incomplete but which are important for the public good. One that particularly interests me at the moment is public rights of way. It's tempting to look at an OS map for public rights of way information before walking it and mapping it, however if we are mapping what we see on the ground then this shouldn't be necessary. Should a public institution express an interest in information on public rights of way in a particular square then I'd be more than happy to help collect it from the marked paths found on the ground. We could start by creating a
 section on the wiki providing details of how public institutions might approach the subject, and a means for conveying suitable requests to the community. Of course commercial companies might want to do this too, and although some people might have reservations about this, they are free to make donations to help OSM out!

I'm reminded of how the Linux Kernel developers made an offer to hardware manufacturers a couple of years back to write drivers for them, all they had to do was ask and provide the necessary information/documentation. From what I've read this has been very successful campaign. If we as members of the OSM community can get a good reputation for responding to requests for particular types of information in the same way, then the OS will either become an irrelevance or will have to change its licensing policies.

Donald



      
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