[OSM-talk] [Talk-us] OpenStreetMap Isn't All That Open, Let's Change That and Drop Share-Alike

[Florian Lohoff]

Hi,

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 11:03:41AM -0400, Phil! Gold wrote:
> If, however, you want to foster a community around a larger scale project,
> I think share-alike is a better path to take.  If OSM switched to public
> domain licensing today, there would almost certainly be more people using
> and benefiting from today's OSM data.  Google in particular would probably
> make OSM data part of its data; they already merge numerous public domain
> datasets into their proprietary dataset.  That would make Google the
> better choice for a lot of people than plain OSM data, and you can even
> edit Google's data through their Map Maker program.  From there, I suspect
> that Map Maker would attract more people that might otherwise have ended
> up contributing to OSM, which would hurt community growth and benefit
> Google at the expense of all the other OSM data consumers.

But this is technically impossible. Either you take OSM and the flow of
changes of contributers for a certain area, or you take some snapshot
and let your community edit it by cutting off the OSM stream.

Google might take OSM data - so what - but either they cut themselves
off the OSM change stream by advertising their MapMaper or stop offering
MapMaker and use our changes.

For technical reasons Google cant use OUR data and THEIR community.

> In my opinion, the single biggest thing that makes OSM valuable is the > community of people contributing to it, and the license on the data needs
> to reinforce that community, not allow proprietary data uses to splinter
> it.

OSM as a Dataset is just half of the story without the community and
steady growing changes and fixes.

So its impossible for ANYONE to get the full OSM benefit without
the community. IMO a share alike does not get new contributions but
hinders adoption.

I want good and current maps everywhere - Be it Google, Audi, BMW,
Mercedes, VW or Bing. I dont want to deal with politics or economics.
OSMs benefit is the community, currentness and grade of detail. This
cant be achieved by our commercial counterparts. So we have already
won "the battle" on all grounds. Its just a matter of time. IMO we
lost concerning our License. 

We have much better Map Data - so why does BMW offer Google? IMO because
it doesnt require BMW to think about it. They can mix in their data and
preprocessing and noone will be questioning BMW about an ODbL and where
the Database is. They can put in their RTTI data in the DB and dont even
need to tell people how it works.

OSM will never be available at that level of simplicity with the current
Share Alike.

Flo
-- 
Florian Lohoff                                                 f at zz.de
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