[OSM-talk] About attribution to authors

Mike mike.cuttlers at gmail.com
Sat Sep 29 08:03:19 BST 2012


On 28.09.12. 18:58, Stephan Knauss wrote:
> we recently switched the license from CC-BY-SA to ODbL. With this new
> license the single author no longer needs attribution.

What do you mean by that? Authorship is denied?

The very essence of authorship laws is that author has rights to get 
attribution for his work.

Making maps is hard and expensive work and denying or hiding authorship 
is injustice to all these people who are creating OpenStreetMap for free.

When people contribute to OpenStreetMaps it is not like they just typed 
in some text or scanned document. Creating maps is the real authorship 
work that demands knowledge, dedication and lots of resources. People 
who are willing to do that do not deserve anonymity except if they 
choose so.

> In case you want to know the history of a single element there is no
> need to download the data set, you can query it on the web interface.
> For example here for the node ID 1:
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/1/history

I know how to get to that info and I think this is wrong way. It looks 
like OpenStreetMap tries to make this information as hard to get es 
possible.

Now everyone knows how to use OpenStreetMaps. Authorship laws require 
that authorship is easily available.

2012/9/28 Mike <mike.cuttlers at gmail.com>:

 > We had this attribution at least in one of the two "official"
 > renderings some years ago (I think it was Osmarender, but I am not
 > sure IIRR). In very high zoom levels the streets had a notice about
 > the username of the last editor. I think this was not continued
 > because it might have incentivated some people of doing trivial edits
 > just to have their name shown up.

I never understood that policy of attributing the last editor.

Each time I fix something and then OpenStreetMap shows me as an author 
makes me feel bad. Someone else did hard work and I get all glory just 
because of minor fix, although even that is visible only to map editors, 
not to the wide public.

This all is contrary to attribution OpenStreetMap demands for itself on 
every occasion.




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