[OSM-talk] Not-properly-Open-but-called-Open

[Frederik Ramm]

Richard,

> In my view, what matters is someone's _overall_ contribution to OSM, not 
> their unquestioning adherence to the doctrine of "free".

I am not talking about classifying *people* into "properly open" and 
"proprietary" - I wanted to classify *projects*.

The author of, say, openmtbmap can be the nicest guy & major OSM 
contributor; if openmtbmap is - for whatever valid reason - not open in 
the sense of letting everyone else look into and use openmtbmap, then we 
should very clearly make this distinction, rather than act as if 
openmtbmap were as open as OpenStreetMap itself.

The same author may have other projects which are properly open and 
which we would of course praise as such.

> Faced with one person who makes an enormous contribution to OSM, but 
> chooses to keep one aspect of their contributions closed-source; and 
> another whose main contribution is a lot of wiki voting, but has sent 
> two preset patches, assiduously annotated with some inordinate licence 
> preamble in capital letters - well, I couldn't criticise the former or 
> deny them any "respect". And "applying pressure" rather smacks of that 
> "Proper attribution" lynch mob.

I think it is really important to not take this to the personal level. 
Just because user X does something propietary with OSM data doesn't mean 
that he is less of a nice guy. However (on the other hand) just because 
he is a nice guy doesn't mean that something proprietary he produces 
should be treated as if it was part of the family.

I'm doing business with OSM and I'm not ashamed to say that some things 
I do are proprietary. Others are open. I don't expect my proprietary 
stuff to feature prominently on the OSM web pages. I would not feel 
ostracised if OSM makes the distinction, saying about some "these are 
cool projects that share the OSM spirit of openness and we fully embrace 
& recommend them" and about others "these are other projects/services 
using OSM data but they are non-free".

> Hey, I managed a whole post about "Not-properly-Open" without mentioning 
> the GPL. ...oh crap.

Well, of course in my mind I'm not making the distinction between a) 
free/open and b) proprietary, but between a**) absolutely free and not 
requiring to sell your soul to RMS, a) free/open if you sell your soul, 
b) proprietary. But I felt that was too much to recommend in one go.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"