Hi, On 07/26/2014 01:38 AM, Jake Wasserman wrote: > The fact that we’re scaring away well-intentioned users is sad.
Let's not kid ourselves here. The overwhelming number of commercial OSM users are not driven by a motivation to help us, but by a motivation to save money (or perhaps a motivation to escape a monopolist's clutch but that boils down to the same). There is potential for an alignment of interests here - OSM wants more exposure, business wants to save money, win-win - but I wouldn't go so far as to label this as "good intentions" on the part of the business. There is a very, very small number of businesses who use our data and who go above and beyond what we require of them because they really believe in the idea of OSM. Businesses who come to us and ask how they can help, and who see the good in OSM even beyond their immediate use case which might be hampered by our license. *Those* are the ones for which I would reserve the term "well-intentioned". By my definition, if you are scared away from OSM because you can't geocode your proprietary data for free, then your good intentions were maybe a bit too superficial. Also, keep in mind that lowering our requirements will lower them for *everyone*, not only the well-intentioned. Company X runs a restaurant guide that displays star-rated restaurants along your chosen journey. They pay lots of $$$ for geocoding their restaurant database. What we're discussing here is letting them switch to OSM for geocoding and the only thing we might get in return is a mention in an about box somewhere. There is no guarantee that this will do *anything* for OSM's exposure or to improve OSM's data, not even to provide an incentive to improve OSM data. Again and again we hear, make it easier for people to geocode their proprietary databases and OSM can only benefit from it because everyone who saves $$$ using OSM somehow magically "helps" OSM. I'm not convinced of that. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
