[OSM-talk] Will Google ever use OSM data?

[Russ Nelson]

On 12/11/2009 21:31, SteveC wrote:
 > That's half true. Nobody likes the uncertainty around CC, but
 > really they want us to be PD because they don't want to give any
 > data away. They'd love to suck it all in, improve it and then keep
 > the improvements. Just look at the current data set they're not
 > releasing, even in the middle of nowhere, Africa.

Steve, one of the things we've learned at the Open Source Initiative
over the past 11 years is that code without community is dead code.
Well, the same thing goes for OSM data.  Without the community that
created it, it's dead data.  That's *exactly* the reason that folks
like Shaun and Andy complain about imports.  Imports are dead data.

So on the one hand we have OSMers saying "Don't use dead data".  On
the other hand, we have you saying "Watch out for sharing our
data without restrictions! Google would use our dead data."[1]

Seems to me that we're either all right, or we're all wrong about that
issue.  Doesn't seem to me like we can be half of either.

--

[1] If you think it's trivial to make additions to OSM without sharing
them back, whilst other people keep editing, consider that some of the
best minds on the planet can't make *removals* from OSM reliably.  We
still have no good way to revert a changeset -- and people think that
Google can make additions which are robust in the face of changing OSM
data?  And if Google *was* going to take our PD data, what's currently
stopping them from taking the data contributed by various OSM editors
who have dedicated their edits to the public domain?  If they haven't
done it for YY% of OSM, it's hard to predict with a straight face that
they would do it to 100% of OSM.

-- 
--my blog is at    http://blog.russnelson.com
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