[OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] Are we strict enough with imports ?

[Nic Roets]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 2:24 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> (I'm hijacking this thread which Nic started about legalities of imports
> on legal-talk, and moving over to talk)

But before you do that, please tell me if you concur on the legal issue...

> * if we are confident that we, the OSM community, will do a better, more
> reliable, more thorough, and more timely job in updating the information
> than the original owner (this includes cases where the original owner
> has ceased maintenance);

There was a time when I agreed with that. Especially for large imports
of data with little navigational use, because it makes manipulating
the data more difficult.

But if we don't import, people will either anticipate the import and
not edit, or they'll add stuff that will conflict with the downstream
merge.

If we do import, people see all the nice things (like the buildings in
Holland) and it raises awareness of OSM.

When the upstream source releases an update, we'll deal with it. For
example, we can take a statistical sample and decide if the edits
added more value than the upstream source. Or we can decide to keep
the old import.
Either way we are moving forward in small steps.