[OSM-talk] License plan

[OJ W]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
> It might be easy to do an automated rendering. That's not what I'm talking
> What concerns me is hand-drawn cartography. The "program code" for
> that, in my case, is something like Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator, which
> anyone can have - but that's incidental.
>
> I spend days on getting the cartography right for the maps we produce in the
> magazine every month. It isn't "rendering". It's entirely done by hand.
> Getting the label placement right, choosing the colour set, working on the
> pull-outs, generalising features so that they don't collide but the user
> doesn't notice the distortion: that _is_ a great deal of effort. I try to
> aspire to OS Landranger quality of cartography, not MapQuest!

Currently OSM surveyors do their thing in the understanding that
cartographers will turn the result into something nice that they can
use (and the surveyors know that they will benefit from this due to
the map images being sharealike)

If the cartographers then devise a new license that says "my
contributions are more important than yours, I should get exclusive
rights over my additions to the map with a paintbrush while you
shouldn't get exclusive rights over your additions to the map with a
GPS" then it reduces the incentive for people to survey, since the
work they do can be published in a way that they can't use or copy.

The only counter-argument to this seems to be that the freetards are
invited to do a free version of cartography themselves, duplicating
effort that has already been done in the proprietary world in order to
get access to the results (as nice map images) of their own surveying