[OSM-talk] Death by a thousand nitpicks

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 11:53, Floris Looijesteijn <osm at floris.nu> wrote:

I know you're probably not a native English speaker (neither am I),
and I don't mean the following as some tirade against your innocent no
doubt well-meaning suggestion, but as a commentary on how we deal with
data users like nearmap and others in general.

> If you could also fix the StreetMap and OpenStreetMaps texts this website
> will be a excellent addition to OSM.

I don't think it "will be", I think it already *is* an excellent
addition to OSM.

When someone uses the OSM data they really have to do quite
little. They just have to embed the data and make sure their users
know about the OSM license terms. Nearmap has clearly done this.

How these users do things like label the tabs under which OSM appears
is completely outside our purview. I'm happy to leave the decision of
whether they call the tab in which some OSM data appears "StreetMap",
"OpenStreetMap" or "BlaghBlgah" to them.

(I'm no designer, but I think they're going for a homogeneity between
"Photo" and "Street" (where "OpenStreet" would confuse the
layman))

Let's try not to subject OSM data users to death by a thousand
self-appointed license nitpickers.

Having guidelines and suggestions is great. But we shouldn't make
users feel like they're somehow second class, or not trying quite hard
enough, just because they don't do any number of things someone thinks
they should be doing.

OSM will do much better in the long term if we keep that sort of
friction to a minimum and welcome new OSM users without subtly
suggesting that they do minor or major redesigns of their sites to
make OSM more prominent.