[OSM-talk] Critical Mass for license change-over
Michael Collinson
mike at ayeltd.biz
Fri Jan 27 17:44:33 GMT 2012
This is a report from the License Working Group and a request for
feedback. If anyone can do translations or summaries for other language
mailing lists, I would be very grateful.
Our moderators have agreed that this is a general topic of concern to
the whole OSM community. If you are a continuing mapper, please feel
free to respond and give your opinion. Only strictly "legal" questions
will be pointed at legal-talk list.
As the license change process evolved, concern was expressed that an
unacceptable amount of data might be lost from the current version of
the OSM database and consensus was reached that phase 5 [1] - the actual
license cut-over - should only happen when a "critical mass" was achieved.
The question I ask you is, do you agree that we have reached critical mass?
Here is our report.
I and the License Working Group think we clearly have reached critical
mass and that the situation will only improve over the next few weeks.
An intense effort is being made to reach still undecided mappers. We
have already asked your help in the UK, Philippines, Canada and USA. We
will go global soon. A number of decliners have also kindly allowed us
to continue using their contributions after making sure that their
concerns were known. A few more may still do so. The OSM Foundation
board has asked us to target April 1st for the change-over.
First, the good numbers.
Several hundred thousand mappers are now actively mapping under the new
contributor terms. Only 420 older contributors have currently explicitly
declined. At least 97.1% of nodes [2] and 96.6% of highways [2] in the
current database were created by continuing mappers. However, some of
those may have been edited later. From up-to-date figures, [3], it looks
as though 3.2M out of 120M ways are problematic in some way. That is
2.68%. It is declining. So, if we can use just one figure, I suggest we
could be at 97.32% readiness ... feel free to challenge!
But what about negative factors?
- There are subjective criteria. The removal of 100 hospital nodes may
be far worse than than the removal of several million import points. ...
Or the loss of a repeatable import may be bad because folks have editted
over the top. It is difficult to judge whether this has a positive or
negative bias overall.
- There are regional and country [2, 4] variations. You might be in an
area where there are bigger problems than than implied by the figures I
have given you. The easiest way to see this is with OSMI License View
tool [5] .
- We still have not been able to get responses from about 35,000 older
contributors who have mapped at least one node. Sorry, this is an
approximate figure at the moment. One impact of this is that there are a
lot of folks who have mapped a small town, stopped mapping and have not
responded.
- On a national level, there are still specific issues we are working on
in Poland and the Czech Republic. In Australia, Montenegro, Kosovo,
Albania, Macedonia and, on a regional basis, in Germany there large
concentrations of data by folks who have specifically declined. In
Liberia and Cyprus, there are key large contributors who have so far not
responded. In Japan, there is also one very large contributor who has
declined, but we understand this is a POI import that will be dropped.
- http://odbl.de/ [4] gives a more pessimistic view than the numbers I
have given you. This is probably due to bot edits and changes which are
harmless, but should be taken into consideration.
And, lastly, you can see what the "new" map will look like if we changed
over today at http://cleanmap.poole.ch/. This is running on a small
machine, so please be patient and try again later if lot's of folks are
hitting it.
Mike
License Working Group
[1]
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License/Implementation_Plan#PHASE_5_aka_Done_-_License_Cut-over_from_CC-BY-SA_to_ODbL_.28date_to_be_decided.2C_depends_on_the_technical_work.29
[2] http://odbl.poole.ch/ (based on early December data)
[3] http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/munin.html
[4] http://odbl.de/
[5] http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=wtfe
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