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

Michal Migurski mike at stamen.com
Sat Jan 28 00:05:13 GMT 2012


On Jan 27, 2012, at 3:48 PM, Nick Whitelegg wrote:

> I really don't mind one way or the other about the licence, and have kept out of it until now mostly because I have no wish to get into arguments... but what I definitely don't want to see are large holes appearing on the map come April 1st. I am particularly concerned about my local patch, Hampshire, with a former mapper, almost certainly in the top 5 Hampshire contributors, having declined the CTs. I do wonder if it will do more harm than good to switch over.

I feel similarly, though I'm biased toward the new license because I'm happier with its stance toward derived works.

Personally, I'll be happiest with a clean break on April 1st. If some data is destroyed and has to be re-created or parts of community peel off to form their own derived works using the last-known-CC planet dumps, I believe that's acceptable collateral damage in return for an unambiguous license situation and an end to nearly a half-decade of this cloud hanging over our heads.

I strongly agree with Nathan and others in this thread who point out that "critical mass" is impossible to judge without an unambiguous plan for data deletion from the Foundation. We have to know what will actually be deleted and how relations or merged/split ways will be affected to truly judge. http://cleanmap.poole.ch offers a possible view of how the map will look on April 1, but it's my understanding that it's an interpretation rather than an official outcome, and comes with numerous "sorry, slow server" caveats.

OSMF should adopt Clean Map and publish a version which reflects the actual future, with the same performance as the current Mapnik layer. I'd also like to see a "parallel planet" dump, with all 20GB of data in the form it will actually take on April 1st, so we can generate our own downstream works as necessary and predict impact.

-mike.

----------------------------------------------------------------
michal migurski- mike at stamen.com
                 415.558.1610






More information about the talk mailing list