[OSM-talk] Re. Critical Mass for license change-over

[Michael Collinson]

So, to tie up the discussion. As in everything OSM, we should be 
transparent and crowd-sourced. A community rebuild group is beginning 
work on use the WTFE algorithm as a basis for the final rebuild. Its 
deliberations are public [1]. WTFE is indicating that roughly 2.6% of 
the database is affected if we rebuilt today.

 From the feedback received, it is important to check that is actually 
true or not before doing anything permanent.  I am therefore strongly 
encouraging the group to not only develop the necessary re-build scripts 
but also test them in a manner that we can see, ideally in the form of a 
test map, on a *copy* of part or all of the OSM database. The OSM 
Foundation board is firmly committed to supporting and providing the 
resources the group may require.

Meanwhile,  the LWG will focus on further reducing the 2.6% by 
contacting undecided users, encouraging constructive remapping and 
resolving country issues. Our next step is to launch a global personal 
contact-and-remap campaign, (well, almost global, there remain some 
special cases). This has been piloted in a few countries and been very 
successful.  Given the straight-line trends [2] I am confident that we 
will get a lot closer to a residual 1% of data that we will have to 
remove no matter what.


Mike
LWG

[1] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/rebuild/

[2] http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/munin.html