[OSM-talk] [Osmf-talk] Attribution guideline status update

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 09 September 2019, Simon Poole wrote:
> To illustrate where this discussion has gone awry please consider a
> rendering using 10 data sources all licensed on ODbL terms (in real
> life it is not uncommon to have multiple dozens of different sources,
> so 10 is not a high number).

I have explained already a month ago that putting the OSM attribution 
requirement on the same level as other data source attributions is 
being fairly cavalier with the role of attribution for the social 
cohesion of the OSM community.  Practically 8 of these 10 data sources 
are produced by people who are getting paid for their work.  About half 
of them have no attribution requirement in the license and maybe 2 or 3 
of them are just cheaper to license if you accept an attribution 
requirement - which brings the whole thing on the level of bargaining 
for advertisement space.

And what happens if one of the data sources has a hard visible 
attribution requirement without the OSMF 'attribution light' liberty?  
As you drafted things it would be perfectly all right to bury OSM 
attribution on the bottom of some general credits page while 
prominently attributing some other source because this was required 
while the OSMF settled for less.

And in any case there are tons of ways to present a lot of different 
data sources to a map user in a way that makes them aware of these 
sources without being misleading.  Just look how the advertisement 
industry does it.  This is not about making OSM data use possible where 
it would otherwise not be - this is about profit margins in the 
attention economy.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/