[OSM-talk] OSMF: The people you are going to hand over your OSM data ...

[Kai Krueger]

Matthew Luehrmann wrote:
> Who controls OSM?  I really am not sure.  My current understanding is that OSMF controls OSM, but calls it "supporting": "The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international non-profit organisation supporting but not controlling the project."  
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> Maybe a better question that will get a less ambiguous answer, and really shows who is in control of OSM, is: Who owns the www.openstreetmap.org domain name.

As far as I know, OSMF owns the domain www.openstreetmap.org, as does it 
own the servers on which OSM runs. But how does that not fit the 
definition of "Support". OSMF runs all the infrastructure and provides 
the technical support to run OSM and make it possible and therefore 
support it. It does not however interfere with any tagging, decide what 
to map or what not to map, decide what gets rendered on the map or any 
other of those types of aspects that you might consider control OSM. It 
also does not own other domains like openstreetmap.de or all the other 
servers that are part of OSM, such as the t at h, trapi or XAPI server or 
any of the servers hosting the national sites. It does not own copyright 
on the data (otherwise there wouldn't be a need for a licensing debate). 
So altogether, if OSMF died or got taken over, OpenStreetMap would still 
survive and continue, even though it would hurt it considerably. So I 
think that fits quite nicely into the idea of "supporting the community" 
rather than controlling it. And even the licensing debate could be seen 
as "support" even though that indeed has a little bit more of a 
controlling element to it. But it is support in that the current license 
is broken and inapplicable to geodata as has every lawyer they have 
asked so far said (as far as I can tell). They then went and spent an 
enormous amount of time discussing the issue with various copyright 
lawyers, with OSM community members and anyone else who wanted to 
discuss it and help with the progress and make sure that the views of 
the entire community get heard in the legal process. And now that they 
have come up with a proposal that is as close as possible in spirit to 
the old license that everyone has agreed to, they first present it for a 
vote to OSMF members and if they agree that it is good enough present it 
for a vote to all members.

Kai

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