I like Andrew's message below as I am Interested in what others are doing and why. So below is what effects the licence has had on me and I hope I might encourage others to share what they will be doing. Hopefully this might help us all make more informed decisions, knowing what Australians plan to do and why.
I know whatever I admit I am doing some people will disagree (very strongly in some cases). I don't intend to argue my position. Frankly I see no enjoyment or profit in such arguments. My silence on any rebuttal does not imply I am convinced with an excellent argument only that I have chosen not to reply. Now the effect the licence change has made to me. One sentence overview: On the whole I have become disillusioned and have stopped adding to any database and have vastly curtailed my use of open map data. Why? Well I did use CC-BY-SA OSM data in three areas and no project fills all those needs for me anymore. Area 1. Creating maps for internal web based applications in a mid-sized listed Australian company. As soon as it was discovered that OSM was moving from the familiar CC-BY-SA licence to an unfamiliar licence I was instructed to use a Microsoft product instead. The reason being that the legal cost of reviewing any unfamiliar licence would far exceed the cost of a Microsoft product we were being offered. (CC-BY-SA was easy. We went to our in-house council and they passed on to us a free document from one of the big legal firms going over the pros, cons and risks.) The time and money has been invested now so there will be no coming back from the decision in the near term. Area 2. my own little mapping applications .and preventing my contributions being exploited Same unfamiliar licence issue as above. I could read the licence myself but I am not a lawyer. I could pay a lawyer but I have better uses for my money. FOSM is probably the best alternative. Area 3. Maps on various Garmin GPSrs Sites such as www.osmaustralia.org enable me to easily use OSM maps on my GPSrs. These maps tend to be much better for bush trails and I can of course help improve them. OSM is still the best for these. On the whole I have put mapping out of my mind to come back to later. I have done similar things with other hobbies. Maybe I will come back to it like I did wargaming or maybe it will still be sitting (metaphorically) in the garage in 20 years like my model trains have been. Mark (aka NilbogAus) From: Andrew Harvey Sent: Wednesday, 6 July 2011 9:30 PM To: OSM Australian Talk List Subject: [talk-au] Active Australian OSM contributors in light of CT/license changes Since the ban on all contributors who didn't sign the CTs, and ban on all new contributors from using NearMap and other CC-BY/CC-BY-SA sources, I'm no longer actively contributing to the OSM database. Instead I am now actively contributing to the fosm database. I am interested to hear what other active Australian OSM contributors will be doing now. Just looking through the list at http://odbl.de/australia.html we have a fair amount of people who have been locked out, and also people who ticked the CTs who have used CC-BY/CC-BY-SA sources in the past who may want to keep this data and continue using these sources in the future. So, active Australian OSM contributors, are you staying with the OSM db? If so how are you going to do edits going forward, because any CC-BY-SA derived data you add may be removed if OSM abandons CC-BY-SA at some point in the future (or may even be conflicting with your agreed CTs now...). Are you moving to the fosm db? If so, great! Less problems with trying to merge your data into fosm, and we can all get back to mapping. Do you have any concerns over the switch? Are you going to stop contributing data altogether? Or are you putting you efforts on hold at the moment. I'm interested in Australia wide, but I'm personally most interested to hear from Franc, behemoth14, rrankin, Zhent, Ebenezer, swanilli, inas, Diego, good2010, dexgps. (these are just those that come to mind from looking over recent edits in the Sydney area)
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