[OSM-talk] Let's talk Attribution

[Tobias Knerr]

Hi Alexandre,

it's true that too many projects using OSM do not provide the required
attribution. However, I'm surprised that you got reactions of
"this is fine" for some of the more egregious examples you mention in
your email. While individual mappers will of course hold a wide range of
opinions, that is not the position of the OSM Foundation.

On 27.04.20 19:49, Alexandre Oliveira wrote:
> On the mobile
> version of the Facebook page, there's no attribution at all, simply a
> map. And worse, it redirects to Google Maps when you click on it.

I assume this is the same issue as the one described here:
https://github.com/grischard/osm-lacking-attribution/issues/8

Facebook was contacted about this specific problem 2.5 months ago. They
have acknowledged it as an issue, but have unfortunately failed to
correct it so far. For now, we still have hope that they will just
finally fix it. At some point, we may have to take further steps, but we
haven't really come to an agreement on what those would be.

For OSMF action on issues which are less clear-cut (i.e. attribution is
present, but insufficient), the main roadblock is that we have not yet
approved the attribution guidelines which will make it clearer what
style of attribution we expect. Of course, data users are already
obligated to follow our license today, but hopefully the guidelines will
help to eliminate any ambiguity about whether certain controversial
practices are acceptable. The most recent version of the guidelines
drafted by the LWG is almost there, but has drawn community criticism
about being too generous especially w.r.t. initially hidden attribution.
We are working on them, and once they are approved, we will point to
them when we contact data users about low-quality attribution.

I admit that the OSMF has been frustratingly slow to make progress on
attribution, and I hope we will get better about this.
But there's a lot that can be achieved by the community in a distributed
manner as well. You've already mentioned the #AttributionIsNotOptional
initiative as an example. It's not rare to hear success stories about
mappers simply sending a friendly reminder to some companies, especially
small-scale users who made a honest mistake and forgot about the
attribution. It also helps to report lacking attribution to Guillaume's
previously mentioned issue tracker¹ – the board is keeping an eye on
that and prioritizing issues based on whether the site or app has
already been contacted, how bad the attribution is, and on how visible
the site is.

In any case, I'd like to emphasize that a slow response to missing
attribution should not be mistaken for being ok with it. Nor does it
mean that we will not act more decisively in the future. Visible
attribution is a key requirement of our license, and not optional.

Tobias

 ¹ https://github.com/grischard/osm-lacking-attribution