[OSM-talk] Revert requests in general

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 4 August 2010 11:10, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Ben,
> Ben Last wrote:
>> Interesting idea, but one aim of this whole effort is to increase the
>> number of people who can contribute to OSM and help bring it to the
>> point where OSM data is a usable way to do geocoding or address-search
>> (which it isn't at the moment).  Using OSB doesn't really meet that
>> aim.
>
> I was thinking more along the lines of using OSB as an entry drug.
>
> You kind of have a point there with addresses and all; assume you'd just
> produce your very own database of house numbers built by your users, then
> release that, say, as PD or CC0. It would only be days until someone in OSM
> came along and proposed to import your database into OSM, which would
> effectively end up the same (all data being contributed under one user id).
>
> But in that scenario, the importing user would take full responsibility, and
> if it turned out that a significant portion of the import was in some way
> faulty, the whole import would be rolled back.

That's possibly the worst way to handle it, and it has been done a
couple of times already and I really hope we're moving away from this
model to better collaboration with other projects, and so as to avoid
multiple diverging databases.  It's a *huge* amount of work trying to
"sync" databases, a work that could really be avoided if a model like
nearmap.com or that openaddress (was that the name?) are introducing
(it wasn't discussed much when that OA site was announced..).  I know
first hand about this kind of imports.

Note that nearmap.com is taking it pretty seriously about taking
responsibility.  Also note that they mentioned in another thread that
they want to contribute under share-alike licenses (including ODbL) so
that they can use improvements made to data that they release or that
is based on the imagery.  The repeated asking for releasing as PD is
amounting to trolling.

Cheers