[OSM-talk] [Announce] OSMF license change vote has started

[80n]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Morten Kjeldgaard wrote:
> > Making those nodes and ways, the users employ
> > their judgement and knowledge about the landscape, as in "I don't trust
> the
> > the GPS track around here because of trees and tall buildings," or "I'll
> > place a POI there because I know it's a pretty good pizza place. I'll
> look
> > up the opening hours too."
> >
> > I would argue that the latter is creative works and not under the
> category
> > considered by the CC to be "data"?
>
> This is a hotly debated issue. My personal take on this is: Our aim is
> to come as close as possible to reality with OSM. We have to make
> compromises but these are not by design - if there *was* a way to record
> the extent and location of a street and not die from information
> overload then we *would* do that.
>
> A judge might well be swayed by the arguments presented in a recent BBC
Horizon programme titled "How Long is a Piece of String?":
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p1fpc  It's certainly presented at a
level that a judge would be able to understand ;)

The essence is of course that you cannot measure these things with perfect
accuracy and every measurement is a compromise.  It's this compromise that
means that any line on a map is an abstraction of reality and not reality
itself.  Any abstraction of reality requires some interpretation and
creative decision making.

I think a half decent lawyer could probably make a good case out of this.
Sadly, that's the only way this would ever get settled, no matter how much
we argue about it amongst ourselves here.

80n



We cannot do it because of technical limitations - we cannot measure
> everything that exactly, and even if we could, we couldn't store all the
> information, and even if we could, we couldn't process it.
>
> So if OSM is anything other than pure facts, then this is not because we
> want OSM to be an artsy project and thus have introduced some degrees of
> freedom in how something can be mapped. It is purely because of
> technical shortcomings.
>
> Any not-fact we have is, if you will, an inaccuracy that we would get
> rid of at the first opportunity.
>
> Thus, it would strike me as odd to make a principle of this
> "non-factualness" of OSM and claim copyright on the creative aspect. OSM
> is, in my eyes, a data collection project and not a creative works project.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
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