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

LM_1 flukas.robot+osm at gmail.com
Fri Jan 27 20:19:45 GMT 2012


I would have higher standard for critical mass, definitely over 99 %.
There should be a prolonged (at least one year) period where it is
known what data can remain and what cannot to allow seamless switch.
Having two months to the planned switch and still not knowing the
exact algorithm to determine what stays seems just stupid.

Lukas (LM_1)

2012/1/27 Michael Collinson <mike at ayeltd.biz>:
> 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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