[OSM-talk] Suggestion to add SA clause to CT section 3, describing "free and open license"

[John Smith]

On 19 July 2010 23:19, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> want to change to a non-SA license, why should we keep them from it? In one
> or two years, "two thirds of active contributors" will be a greater number
> of people than all of us today. Who are we to tell them what to do? We're
> the minority ;)

I love the stats that get thrown about within OSM, if I remember
correctly about this time last year people were spouting about how
they expected the number of users to be around a million accounts by
now, instead we only have about 100k more, although the real number of
accounts that have actually been used to make edits is closer to about
70k in total...

As for numbers of active users, it's a little more difficult to figure
out since the graphs on the wiki stats page only shows it as a
percentage, however I highly doubt this to keep increasing
exponentially, just like the number of user accounts didn't keep
increasing exponentially and this was a completely unreal expectation.
Unless there is a massive publicity campaign to keep the number of
active editors increasing, I expect the percentage of active editors
to keep declining although at some point it will plateau as well.

If you want realistic expectations take a look at wikipedia, active
editors has been decreasing, and not just as a percentage, last I
heard, and the barrier to entry into wikipedia is a lot lower,
although the kinds of things that can be mapped is potentially a lot
higher, the majority of people mostly care about the road networks
most of the time and these tend to be the easiest things to map.