[OSM-talk] Hitting reset on talk-au

Brendan Morley morb.gis at beagle.com.au
Mon Jul 11 13:46:11 BST 2011


On 11/07/2011 8:08 PM, Simon Poole wrote:
> It's really up to -them- to remedy the mistakes -they- made (ABS2006 
> import and similar).

I'm sad to think you characterise ABS2006 as a "mistake".

*** Warning - some licensing discussion follows ***

ABS2006 is a CC BY dataset isn't it?

While I haven't been following many of the latest arguments, for me it 
seems the "irreconcilable differences" stem from:

* The Australian Government is in love with the CC By and related CC 
licences for any Australian publicly funded information, refer 
www.ausgoal.gov.au for the latest incarnation of this policy.
* AusGov seem to have no problem with the use of CC By for databases.
* Mappers are in love with the highest quality open representation of 
the map possible (I assume).
* If ABS2006 is a mistake licensing-wise, then it would be a mistake to 
import any Australian Government geodata into OSM these days.
* Some of these AusGov geodatasets are hard to simulate any other way 
(e.g. land parcels and suburb boundaries).
* The move away from CC By-SA materially reduces the quality available 
to the OSM map in Australia - both from Government and Nearmap sources.
* People get cranky if their perceived quality of life gets threatened - 
the quality of the OSM data in Australia being a proxy for this in the 
Australian OSMming community.

This is the main reason why I created CommonMap.  I am not interested in 
share-alike (geodata that is freely published cannot be "taken") and I 
am interested in the highest quality open representation of the map 
possible.  It seems, for better or for worse, that there is no longer a 
way to do this using OSM in the Australian context.


Brendan




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