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

Petr Holub hopet at ics.muni.cz
Fri Jan 27 22:13:05 GMT 2012


Mike,

> - 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.

this is quite important perspective. In the Czech Republic, we're
facing significant frustration by the community when they see what
happens to the map after deletion of the data. We had at least two
very active mappers who did lot of work (both imports and manual
work), who declined to accept ODBL (our understanding is namely because
they don't like the concept of changing the license on an established
project). We're trying to solve at least part of this problem by
adopting their imports, but it is not going to be very easy.

The problem is that their work served as a bases for work of other
people and therefore we will lose significant amount of work by
the people who agreed to the change. And these people just get
frustrated and want to leave the community - I'm talking, e.g.,
about a guy who contributed 2% of total volume of data in the
Czech Republic by himself, so it's not anything marginal...

So if it affects highway=* (which are very important for many
reasons and often hard to map, esp. tracks and paths under foliage),
waterways (which are hard to map as these are also often under
foliage), and landuse outside of imports (again, lot of manual work),
my suggestion is that we need to get significantly over 99% preservation
to justify the license change.

Petr




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