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

Michal Migurski mike at stamen.com
Sat Jan 28 04:59:35 GMT 2012


On Jan 27, 2012, at 4:48 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:

> On 01/28/2012 01:05 AM, Michal Migurski wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> I think that realistically, taking into account the time, manpower, and other resources available, you can expect to have an unambiguous plan in the form of a verbal description, or *maybe* at most a script or program that enables you to generate an ODbL planet from the full history file*. But certainly not a definitive, fast, and planet-wide "cleanmap", nor regular planet dumps with the license change rules applied.

That's weird. What's going to happen on April 1, then? Keeping in mind that I am in support of the license switch, I think it's completely reasonable to expect a technical plan for a switch just 60 days in the future. Especially in the context of a thread starting by the license group looking for feedback. The question was "do we have critical mass?" - there's no way to answer that without a way to measure impact.


> I agree these things would be nice to have but I don't see where they should come from. Currently we don't even have the algorithm.

Then it sounds like nobody's ready for April; not the LWG, not the Foundation, and not any of us.


> If anyone has the hardware and time and brain capacity to build something that generates "parallel planet files", my recommendation is to start setting this up now, even though the final algorithm might not be clear, so that once the algorithm is published you can react quickly.

I donated money towards a new server just a short time ago. Might that be useful for this purpose?


> (*) There is no final algorithm. There is "the best that OSMF can come up with" but it will have problems, and there *will* be things deleted which will be reinstated later, and there *will* be things kept which have to be deleted later after a complaint. In a way, the algorithm that OSMF comes up with is just a best guess, much like the algorithm currently used by the OSM inspector.


Yeah, but it will come from the OSMF, which makes it authoritative. Unlike every other tool that has been suggested and developed. Since the algorithm will be so provisional at launch, there should be a parallel data and tile service set prior to launch and an old data set and tile service post-launch.

-mike.

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michal migurski- mike at stamen.com
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