[OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] Remapping - tags and practice

Stephen Gower socks-openstreetmap.org at earth.li
Tue Jul 12 11:18:59 BST 2011


[Note: I have cross-posted my reply to OSM-Talk as I'm not sure this is a
legal matter. For the sake of etiquette, I have set Reply-To back to the
Legal-Talk list, but do respond in either place as you think appropriate.
Richard's full original post can be viewed at http://bit.ly/nqQBmr AKA
http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/OSM-legal-talk-Remapping-tags-and-practice-td6549042.html ]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2011 at 10:37:30AM +0100, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> 
> As the licence change draws on, we will inevitably be looking at remapping
> objects touched by a decliner.

I totally agree, by phase 5 there will have been a process to delete all
non-ODbL data.  The final stage of this will have to be an automatic "bot"
that is very conservative about what it accepts - so in your example will
revert to C's version. Just like with imports, we can do so much better if
there is a crowd-sourced manual process, rather than a dumb-bot approach.

> I'm interested in how we (as users) tackle something like [...  A-F have
> all edited an object, D, the only decliner, made a change to one tag ...]
> Should I
> 
> a) create a new object which is the same as A+B+C+E+F, with a tag such as
> "history=formerly way 8678374, user 891 removed"?

I'm inclined towards this as the simplest, perhaps because I am not a
programmer who can contribute to the tools required to implement an
alternative.  Downsides I can think of are that it breaks the history across
two objects and will also break external services that (despite advice not
to) use the object id to cross reference an OSM object. Are there any other
downsides I've missed?

This method could be used already, although it would be nice if editing
software could assist by providing a "copy and delete" function to create
the new object that could then be edited to remove the non-ODbL info.

> b) simply change the existing way to remove user D's contributions, and
> add a tag (to the changeset or the way?) to say "user 891 removed"

As you say, this requires the final bot to be written to parse this, and
also anything that provides analysis of licence-status of objects also needs
to cope.  That, to me, sounds like a lot of stake-holders who are all going
to have different ideas as to the exact formulation of the tag - this could
take a Long Time to implement.

> c) or something else?

Quite possibly, although I can't think of it!

S



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