[OSM-talk] immutable=yes Fwd: DEC Lands

[Russ Nelson]

On Mar 16, 2009, at 2:18 PM, Andy Allan wrote:
> No he's not, and plenty of other people are in agreement here. It's a
> question of the point of having a community in OSM (vs a large
> collection of uneditable datasets), and you're arguing about technical
> stuff. Technical comes second, community first.

And when the community is wrong about stuff, I'm gonna say so.   
There's a reason why people create generalized interfaces and standard  
metadata and a common currency and a shared language and a  
marketplace.  There's a reason why traders invented the rule of law  
before governments ever saw the necessity.  Having a "thing" where  
everybody knows that when you do that "thing", you get to play with  
the big boys is what prevents centralization; what distributes power;  
what destroys monopolies.

If freedom is important to you, then you also should understand the  
wisdom of voluntarily giving up some of that freedom in order to  
cooperate with other people.

Sorry if I wax too philosophic here, but I'm a combiner, not a  
splitter.  To my mind there is one and exactly one reason why  
something should or should not be included in OSM: whether it's  
copyright-compatible and whether some body wants to add it.  Yes,  
there could be stuff in OSM which is marked edit=fuck-no-you-moron.   
Could they edit it?  Yes.  Should they?  Only if they want to make  
enemies.  Cooperation is a two-way street.

--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
russ at cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson