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

Nathan Edgars II neroute2 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 27 18:19:19 GMT 2012


On 1/27/2012 12:44 PM, Michael Collinson wrote:
> 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.

Thank you.
>
> 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?

This cannot be answered until we know exactly what criteria will be used 
for determining taintedness. The current tools (all? based on WTFE) do 
not take into account splitting and merging of ways. If the OSMF decides 
to be more diligent and dig into the history, we have a big problem, 
since much of the remapping effort will have been based on assumptions 
that are no longer true. (It's possible that this is a much bigger issue 
in places like the U.S. where the initial street data was imported, and 
thus splits and merges of initially-untainted ways that contain 
untainted nodes are more common, so perhaps anyone looking at this issue 
should concentrate on these areas.)

In short, we cannot know if the data loss is acceptable without knowing 
what data will be lost. Will the OSMF follow the WTFE algorithm?



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