[OSM-talk] sponsorship and corporate OpenStreetMap-Foundation membership

[Greg Troxel]

Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> writes:

> Is there a formal policy who can become corporate
> OpenStreetMap-Foundation member, and from whom does the
> OpenStreetMap-Foundation accept donations?
>
> Are there companies engaged in business fields we would not want to be
> associated with, and which would these fields be?

That's a really interesting question, given the norm in Open Source and
Free Software (which Open Data is not) about not discriminating by
fields of endeavor.

What about companies engaged in advertising that engage in fine-grained
data collection about browsing history, in ways that are hard to
understand and hard to avoid?  That's what I'd probably be most
uncomfortable about, personally.  But that's probably not what you are
thinking of.

> If North Corea donated 1 million, would we accept it?

If OSMF were a US entity, then various embargoes would apply; I have no
idea about the UK.

> Do you believe we should have such a policy?

It might be best to have the board vote to accept corporate members or
not one by one, and pause and adopt a policy if necessary, and otherwise
defer.  Unless there are 1000s of such members, in which caes it doesn't
matter.

One might also accept donations, but not consider corporations to be
eligible for membership at all.
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