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

[Shaun McDonald]

On 16 Mar 2009, at 20:40, Russ Nelson wrote:

>
> 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, you are wrong. It is not just the license, but also whether the  
data is able to be collected and edited by the average mapper. You  
MUST remember the editable bit of wiki in the slogan "The Free Wiki  
World Map"!!! The DEC is able to use the OSM software to store their  
data, thus making it easier to integrate into other OSM data if  
require. That would be a far better option than stuffing the data into  
osm and marking it that you should not edit it.

Shaun