[OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] In what direction should OSM go?

[Anthony]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 6:58 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Instead of importing data, data should be mixed in at the rendering stage.

It really depends on the data.  If the data can be imported in a form
which is already commonly used for non-imported data, I'd say it
should be imported (carefully, which often means manually).

> Importing data is, in my eyes, almost never acceptable if the original
> source is still maintaining the data (because keeping stuff in sync is
> practically impossible and it is better to simply not have that data in OSM
> and rely on the original source exclusively), or if imported data cannot be
> maintained by mappers (either because there are none, or because the data is
> not visible on the ground).

I'd say the latter matters, but the former doesn't.

Of course, if keeping stuff in sync is practically impossible, a good
import is probably going to have to be manual (if you can't keep stuff
in sync, and the data is in a form which is already commonly used for
non-imported data, then you can't avoid redundancies in the import).