[OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

[SteveC]

Great post Dair!

On 5 Mar 2009, at 02:04, Dair Grant wrote:

> Nop wrote:
>
>>> I want to correct something here, there is this view of 100,000  
>>> users
>>> needing consent. The number is in fact far smaller for people who  
>>> ever
>>> made an edit (about 30% of the users). It's vastly smaller still for
>>> anyone who has edited anything significant. It's an easier problem  
>>> than
>>> you might think, is what I'm saying. Far easier than convincing  
>>> you I
>>> don't have a satanic portal in my basement.
>>
>> You know what you're saying? You don't care about 100000 people who  
>> are
>> interested or want to contribute, you just care about the data of the
>> 8000 (?) who have substantially contributed?
>
> That's not what he is saying at all.
>
> Nobody is planning to ditch contributions below some threshold for  
> the sake
> of it, however things should not stall simply because one person who's
> contributed one post-box two years ago can't be contacted any more.
>
> All he's saying is that although we might have 100K registered  
> users, only
> 30K of them have made an edits whatsoever.
>
> Looking at the stats page, only about 8K are making edits each month  
> (a
> different 8K each month, sure).
>
> This paper (http://tinyurl.com/5p2w65) looked at contributors in the  
> UK, and
> found that of the 1100 users in their sample some 92 of them had  
> contributed
> 80% of the data (or 0.08% - about 8K again, a nice coincidence).
>
>
>> This is a community. This is about people. At least it should be.
>>
>> Can't you understand why people do not trust you and suspect you are
>> just out to grab their work when you argue like this?
>
> Nobody is trying to grab anyone's work. Doing so would take far less  
> effort.
>
> But a licence change is effectively like an (internal) fork, and we  
> may find
> that some people disagree so strongly that their contributions can't  
> be
> carried forward.
>
> Or simply that we decide to be very cautious, and feel we can't take  
> forward
> data we can't be 100% sure about.
>
> It's sensible to understand just what impact that would have, since  
> we are
> going to lose some data no matter what (some contributors are now  
> dead;
> we're not going to contact their relatives, so we either  
> unilaterally put
> their data under a new licence or we remove it).
>
>
>> Even though I am in favour of the licence itself, this way of  
>> thinking
>> is unacceptable to me.
>
> So what are you doing to help?
>
>
> -dair
> ___________________________________________________
> dair at refnum.com              http://www.refnum.com/
>
>
>
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Best

Steve