Re: [OSM-talk] New building colour

[andrzej zaborowski]

I don't care much for specific colours but I would like the original
differentiation between building types to be kept or improved.  It was
more subtle than the proposed "important" buildings style, but was
nice visually and useful.

I understand this change was mostly a rewrite and so keeping previous
features was not the simplest way to go (as it normally would), but I
don't like how the change is announced in the various places as a
lightening of tone without mention of the removal of processing of the
building= tag values, or justification for this.

Cheers

On 4 January 2015 at 18:57, Janko Mihelić  wrote:
> I like how churches have a darker colour. I'd like for schools, hospitals
> and other more important buildings to also have the darker colour.
>
> 2015-01-04 18:34 GMT+01:00 SomeoneElse :
>>
>> On 04/01/2015 13:01, Lester Caine wrote:
>>>
>>> Perhaps now is the time to be looking again at real time rendering with a
>>> selectable style sheet, or perhaps simply a base layer on top of which
>>> different languages and styles can be selected.
>>
>>
>> That sort of thing has been suggested before(1) but having configurable
>> tile layers on osm.org needs someone to actually write the code to support
>> that.  If you just want to create a map style for your customers, then of
>> course that isn't a requirement - the tools to do it are available and the
>> process to set up an OSM-a-like tile server is well documented(2).  There
>> are maintenance aspects that are less well documented, but even most of that
>> info's around somewhere.  I switched from mostly using the osm.org
>> "standard" style back in the summer when it became clear that its priorities
>> weren't mine.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Andy
>>
>> 1) https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2014-December/028206.html
>> - and probably many times previously too.
>>
>> 2) See summary of links at the end of
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2014-December/028205.html
>>
>>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Edit with Filter On - Show new Tracing

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 16 September 2014 22:34, Alex Rollin  wrote:
> I want to trace while filters are on. What should I add to the filter so
> that my new traces will appear.
>
> What seems to be happening is I start to draw and the first node and the
> line are immediately filtered out.
>
> My filter is simple:
>
> add to selection
> (landuse:)

With this filter and a check in the "Inverse filter" columns,
appending " | (tags:0 new)" makes it work for me.  Without "Inverse
filter" checked it works as is.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM France "BANO" project... openaddresses in France

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 16 May 2014 12:03, Martin Koppenhoefer  wrote:
> So basically you can only import data that is compatible with ODbL and/or
> cc-by-sa 2.0 and which can later be relicensed. According to the CTs it
> would seem as if you could also contribute cc-by-sa 2.0-only data, which is
> in my understanding not possible as long as osmf publishes the data as ODbL.

That's not true and it has been clarified by the LWG even before the
license change process ended.  You comply with the CTs if the data you
upload is compatible with the current license (ODbL) and otherwise you
accept that what you uploaded may be removed.

Your interpretation would disallow any sources requiring attribution
which includes imports discussed at the time of the license change
(e.g. under the UK Open Government License).  If the intention was to
disallow share-alike sources, this would have been stated in the CTs.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] Organizational mapping policy

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 15 May 2014 01:03, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
> If you're in the HOT business then you might immediately see how this
> could apply to some of your projects and might make life harder. When I
> read the proposal, I think of the countless man-hours (and frustration
> and desperation and heated tempers) involved when mappers on the German
> forum once again find a strange edit pattern and over the course of days
> and hundreds of messages the truth slowly emerges.
>
> There's nothing punitive here; there's an attempt to make life easier
> for everyone. It is not about regulating anything - I don't think Paul
> said anything about anyone enforcing mapping rules or whatever - it is
> just about transparency and disclosure.
>
> If someone teaches OSM to a group of people and instructs them to set up
> an account - does it really make matters worse if you ask them to write
> one sentence on their profile page ("I am Joe Smith and I am learning
> OSM in Mikel's OSM for Dummies course")? Would this not be good practice
> already, even if not expressly written anywhere?

The case of existing users mapping under the direction of others, or
users switching between their own mapping and being directed by
someone are probably relatively rare.  So the main case being new
users coming to OSM as part of a directed group, osm can maybe borrow
one or two mechanisms used on other websites:

* a field in the signup form where they can type in or select an
option about how the arrived in OSM, whose value may only be
retrievable by the DWG,

* sign-up links with an embedded referer that a workshop teacher can
create and mail to students, or if it is possible to implement
sufficiently short links then even write them on the blackboard.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] NYPL / map-vectorizer - An open-source map vectorizer

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 7 January 2014 14:35, Christoph Hormann  wrote:
> On Monday 06 January 2014, Maurizio Napolitano wrote:
>> The lab of the New York Public Library created this software
>> to automate and extract gis data from scanned maps
>> http://www.gislounge.com/automating-extracting-gis-data-scanned-maps/
>
> Note for vectorizing buildings there have also been several
> demonstrations based on potrace - which meanwhile features a GeoJSON
> backend that simplifies the process:

The problem with potrace is that it needs exact colours without the
imperfections of paper drawings and scanner noise.  I imagine the NYPL
tool is better adapted to scanned material.

I've used modified potrace to digitize cadastre data for one city
(potrace was modified to deal with huge tiled images), but later wrote
a dumb python vectoriser that outputs .osm
(https://github.com/balrog-kun/vectoriser), which has similar
limitations to potrace but it can deal with unfilled outlines and I'd
like it to detect line thickness as a next step (which sometimes
reflects building attributes).  Unfortunately it's currently tied to a
specific input tile format.  Neither potrace nor my code properly
understands dashed lines which needed a lot of manual work.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM relation ID property in Wikidata

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 6 May 2013 21:20, Peter Wendorff  wrote:
> Am 06.05.2013 20:26, schrieb Tobias Knerr:
>> On 06.05.2013 18:54, Peter Wendorff wrote:
>>
>> [...]
>>> Let's see this example: A building that was a merchants kontor a few
>>> hundret years ago, and now contains a museum and a restaurant, while in
>>> between it was - let's say - a hospital).
>>
>> That's historical mapping. The problems would be the same for e.g. the
>> name. But as for the parts of the example that are not directly "historic":
>
> No, it's not. I did not speak about mapping the hospital and the
> merchants kontor, but about wikidata entries ahout the hospital and the
> merchants kontor - and wikidata in fact includes historical entities
> like that, too.

If you're not adding those historical entities to OSM (or a similar
database like that historical osm once discussed) then there's no
issue with linking to Wikidata because there's nothing to be linked.
If on the other hand you want to add that hospital and that kontor,
then in the historical mapping schema I believe you'd add them as
separate objects with their own start_date and end_date tags so that's
what would link to wikidata (if you wanted to).

>
>>
>>> - the merchant's person page (his office)
>>
>> Wikidata would link to their internal building item instead. Not our job
>> imo.
>>
>>> - the museum's page
>>
>> Can be linked using the wikidata key at the museum POI.
>>
>>> - the restaurant's page
>>
>> Can be linked using the wikidata key at the restaurant POI.
> You assume here that osm has distinct objects for building, restaurant
> and museum, but often that's not the case.
> Let's say the building mainly "is"/hosts the museum, and the restaurant
> is a small part of it, covering a part of the building only (may be part
> of the museum, too.

If it doesn't occupy the entire building then you can probably add the
museum tag on the building geometry but later once you want to add a
wikidata tag you'd probably split it out like you'd split a street
object when you want to add an attribute that applies to a part of the
attribute.  If you're into indoor mapping then you'd draw the museum
outline separately anyway.

Or you could do namespaces, basically using the same criteria as with
different attributes.  For example opening_hours which may be
different for the museum and the building.  The mechanism can be the
same for wikidata=* as for e.g. opening_hours=* and oneway=*.

> We don't have distinct objects in OSM in every case. Without the
> restaurant, the museum and the building are the same, identical object;
> but may be divided later perhaps into two objects (where one changes
> it's semantics)
>>
>>> - the architect's page
>>
>> Can be linked using the architect:wikidata key at the building.
>
> Now you introduce a different approach to my overall question, and start
> to use namespaces for wikidata-tags.
> So why not in general use namespaces for all (even the cases above):
>
> restaurant:wikidata
> museum:wikidata
> architect:wikidata
> fire1934:wikidata
> merchant:wikidata
>
> I think, that get's very verbose once wikidata lifts off, and I don't
> think it's a good idea.
>
>> It could be argued that we should leave that to Wikidata, though - they
>> have an "architect" property for buildings themselves.
> +1
>
>>
>>> - the page of the person where the name of the building comes from
>>
>> Can be linked using the name:etymology:wikidata key at the building.
>> Again, we theoretically could omit this and instead rely on Wikidata's
>> "named after" property.
>
> To sum up your arguments:
> well... let's use foreign keys, but only somewhere.
> What's the rule you propose for this? when to use the wikidata-tag and
> when not?
> Is it possible to describe a rule for this? (even if we don't want to
> enforce that rule, somehow what you propose should be documented and
> therefore has to be documentable in a reasonable form).
>>
>>> Perhaps look into the overpass-permanent-ID solution for that.
>>
>> In my opinion that's not really a good solution here. Manually creating
>> Overpass API queries is too hard.
> That's true, but what you propose is (yet) hard, too:
> To decide where to link to wikidata and where to rely on wikidatas
> internal links requires deep knowledge about the wikidata system, which
> is IMHO not acceptable as a general precondition for mappers (whose
> majority will have to deal with that in future to keep these links
> reasonably up to date).

Again mappers are already dealing with this problem when they add
phone= or website= tags.  There's no clear criteria but it's not a a
problem specific to wikidata links.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM relation ID property in Wikidata

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 3 May 2013 23:22, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
> * some objects whose ID had not changed and who had been created by someone
> who rejected the license were nonetheless kept if it could be shown that
> they had been changed in a major way since;
>
> * some objects that had been freshly created by people agreeing with the
> license change, but that were more or less copies of other objects from
> non-agreers, were removed even though they had a different ID.

The redaction bot code doesn't generally do that and if there were
such cases then they were an insignificant minority compared to those
where the change of the object's ID meant it was considered an
entirely different object.  It's strange that you'd negate that.

>
> I will not discuss this sub-thread further; object IDs are not stable and
> nothing we did during the license change is suitable as a counter argument.

The fact that the IDs are not persistent had been pointed out several
times during the process and both you and the LWG have said (this is
quite clearly stated their meeting minutes) that this isn't an issue
big enough to bother.  There were some statistics posted on the list
and on IRC (from Simon Poole) stating it affected 0.1 to 1% of the
database which is in the millions of objects range.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM relation ID property in Wikidata

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 3 May 2013 23:14, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
> On 03.05.2013 23:08, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
>> The OSMF has sent a pretty strong message saying that object IDs are
>> stable enough to base impactful legal decisions on them.
>
> The OSMF has never sent messages saying that object IDs are stable or even
> "stable enough" for anything; if you interpreted any of the license change
> discussions in that way, you are mis-interpreting them.

I don't understand -- wasn't the entire process based on the
assumption that intellectual property persists as long as the object
ID persists?  Wasn't that in part your own decision?

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM relation ID property in Wikidata

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 3 May 2013 22:58, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
> On 03.05.2013 22:12, Eugene Alvin Villar wrote:
>> The consensus was that--at least for place relations which are the
>> target of the said property--OSM relation IDs are stable enough and any
>> changes in IDs can be easily rectified. Wikidata is a wiki after all.
>
> I am less concerned about the Wikidata side - if they make a bad judgement
> then it is their mess to clean up. I am however concerned that if more
> people simply assume that the status quo is there to stay ("IDs are stable
> enough"), this will put pressure on *us* and limit our flexibility in the
> future.

The OSMF has sent a pretty strong message saying that object IDs are
stable enough to base impactful legal decisions on them.  It will look
silly for them to go back to the stance that IDs aren't stable after
all.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] Build your own GPS receiver

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi Rob,

On 17 March 2013 16:26, Rob Nickerson  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Going back a few years before GPS was widely available in pretty much
> everything bar the kitchen sink (please do post a link if you find a gps
> enabled sink :-) ) there was some discussion about making your own GPS
> receiver. If anyone is interested in taking this on as a nice weekend
> project, I have found that adafruit have a good guide for linking a GPS
> receiver to a Raspberry Pi. All components are reasonably priced and the
> guide covers everthing except running a RPi from a battery (google will help
> here).
>
> http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-ultimate-gps-on-the-raspberry-pi/introduction

I recently had a similar thought when my friend found this:
http://emerythacks.blogspot.fr/2013/01/u-blox-pci-5s-cheap-gps-module-for-your.html

It's an $8 ready to use GPS module.  You could build a receiver with a
battery, flash storage and some sort of display for under $15 with
this.  It won't be the best precision receiver but it also won't be
much worse than current best unaugmented GPS-only receivers (with
EGNOS/WAAS).

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] Recent edits in the wiki / Trademark issue

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 1 February 2013 19:06, Jeff Meyer  wrote:

> The OSMF BoD is doing the job for which its members were elected. Thank
> goodness.
>
> There's a trademark. We've been served notice (I believe). The board has
> made a decision. The chairman of the board (probably a (tm) term...) has
> communicated this decision.
>
> Fine, disagree, but please disagree with a plan for how to fund your
> alternate plan, describing in detail the source of new funds or what other
> OSMF activities should be de-funded to support this plan.
>

I agree with what you're saying although I can't help thinking that if the
OSMF can't take the risk of having some things in the wiki, the solution,
for everyone's benefit, is to move the wiki to a server that's not paid for
by the OSMF.  I'm positive finding such a server wouldn't be difficult (in
fact the home page says it is hosted at UCL & ByteMark -- so if the OSMF is
neither hosting nor writing the content, should it accept the C+D?  The
admins *are* OSMF members, but they're not OSMF).  The OSMF has at some
point started assuming responsibility for what is being published in the
database and now on the wiki.  In the case of the database it makes sense
for someone to give some level of warranty that the data in it in fact is
legally usable, although the consequences of this step have had a terrible
effect on the map and the community so far.


> Yes, it sounds silly to trademark geocode, yes, it's a US-only thing, but
> these issues are solved in courts, with real money for real lawyers, not
> well-reasoned arguments on email threads supported by personal moral and
> ethical constructs and not law.
>

You know, anything someone will say, who is not the judge, is just a well
reasoned argument (or not that well reasoned) and the law will have a final
word.  Doesn't mean that someone pointing out that the law makes it
unlikely for the owner of the GEOCODE trademark to sue a company in UK, or
for it to be costly to resolve, shouldn't be listened to.

Cheers
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Re: [OSM-talk] [Talk-us] Proposed Welcome Working Group meeting (was: Role of the Wiki)

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 10 December 2012 22:59, Martijn van Exel  wrote:
> * What has been attempted before? Did it work? Why (not)?

I won't be in the meeting but there's a (small) dataset that could be
used for analyses of whether automated welcome messages work.  I'm not
planning to produce statistics myself but others can run the
statistics that they see useful.  We're sending automated welcome
messages to users who's first node edit is within Poland and some two
months ago after talking to Paul Norman I changed the logic to only
send the message to ~75% of those users so that the other ~25% could
be used for comparisons with a good probability that the receiving of
the message is independent from other factors.

Roughly all editing users with UIDs >= 813385 and not divisible by 4
were greeted and those divisible by 4 were not (note that the order of
messages is based on the time of first edit, not on the UID).  The
sample is still small, we see about 4 new users a day on average.

I maintain a simple python api to send OSM messages[1] and if it is
decided that it would be good to start welcoming users in a different
region with a specific message I can add that fairly easily if the
rate of new users is below the rate of messages allowed by rails port.

Cheers

1. https://github.com/balrog-kun/osm-scripts

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Re: [OSM-talk] Data copied from Google Maps

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 6 November 2012 00:29, Toby Murray  wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 5:12 PM, Pieren  wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 9:06 PM, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
>>> Not as far as I know.
>>
>> Sad that OSMF is not taking five minutes to post the question to
>> Google. Some contributors did it in the past.
>>
>>> I don't think that a personal message to one individual mapper from someone,
>>> even if in a high position at Google, should be read as Google allowing
>>> every mapper to use their imagery.
>>
>> Most of third party sources agreements came from a high position from
>> that particular source. If we should wait an official 50 pages
>> contract document signed by 25 lawyers, approved and published by
>> OSMF, then we should stop using Bing aerial imagery immediately.
>>
>>> Furthermore, the terms of service contain other restrictions besides the one
>>> about bulk feeds, e.g. an attribution requirement.
>>
>> You probably noticed that the ToS is almost not about street view but
>> mainly about GMaps and GEarth. Attribution and permission is required
>> if you copy the photos or map data which is not what is discussed
>> here.
>
> The terms of service are for using the google maps API. In order to
> view street view images, you must use the google maps API. It doesn't
> leave a lot of room for interpretation.
>
> https://developers.google.com/maps/terms
>
> 10.1.1. General Restrictions. (a) No Access to Maps API(s) except
> through the Service. You must not access or use the Maps API(s) or any
> Content through any technology or means other than those provided in
> the Service
>
> So you the only way to access street view is through the API.
>
> 10.1.3 Restrictions against Data Export or Copying. (a) No
> Unauthorized Copying, Modification, Creation of Derivative Works, or
> Display of the Content. You must not copy, translate, modify, or
> create a derivative work (including creating or contributing to a
> database) of [...]
>
> Note the "or contributing to a database" in there. That pretty much
> exactly describes OSM.
>
> And regardless of the technical legality which may be somewhat of a
> gray area, Google has an infinite number of lawyers compared to OSMF
> and would likely prevail in any action they felt worth bringing
> against us.

The same is true for Microsoft and Yahoo!, in the end it boils down to
something someone at those companies said in an email to someone else.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] Data copied from Google Maps

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 4 November 2012 21:20, Christopher Woods (IWD)
 wrote:
> On 04/11/2012 16:48, Andrew MacKinnon wrote:
>>
>> In my opinion, copying from Google Street View is still a legally
>> dubious thing to do. There is no formal licensing agreement with
>> Google that I know of. It is perfectly fine to capture data by taking
>> pictures yourself, but relying on Google Street View cars to take
>> those pictures is legally dubious. Google Street View is often
>> outdated anyway. Copying from Google Maps is clearly not allowed.
>>
>> I realize that we don't want to alienate users, but I think that OSM
>> still needs to be strict about deleting contributions from legally
>> dubious sources. Many new users simply don't realize that copying from
>> Google is not allowed, and may have made many other contributions from
>> legal sources (which will not be deleted). In other cases, users don't
>> realize that there are sources that OSM is legitimately allowed to
>> copy from - e.g. I have had to explain to users in Canada that copying
>> road names from Google is not OK, but copying from Geobase and Canvec
>> is perfectly acceptable.
>
> This is an interesting discussion about where to draw the line. To use one
> example: I could walk to the end of my street right now and look at the
> street sign; I could then do the same for all neighbouring roads in my
> locality. However, I could go to Google Street View and do the same thing.
>
> For simple pieces of factual data like that, obviously in the public domain
> before Google began to compile their own imagery, my gut feeling is that
> this is arguably OK to do in a pinch. Whilst not preferred, and 'trumpable'
> by another user submitting empirical observations, it's not a clear
> infringement of Google's cache of data as they never had exclusive access to
> the information prior to their own compilation efforts.
>
> You can obtain lists of street names from Royal Mail - heck, you can scrape
> them from PD mapping sources. The road network hasn't changed that
> dramatically in 100 years, save for trunk roads and infill in increasingly
> urban areas (IMO).
>
> However, 1:1 copying of complete topographical or road network information
> is far past the mark and also both a clear infringement of copyrighted
> materials and the licence under which access to said data is granted by the
> owner(s).
>
> If you copied Street View information wholesale, it's also a similarly clear
> infringement of licensed, copyrighted materials. Just the street names,
> however, isn't (on its own) a capital offence nor an obvious infringement of
> copyright.

It doesn't really matter whether the information is copyrightable.
You can only access this information through the Google website and to
use it you have to agree to the terms of use of that website,
including agreeing that you wouldn't systematically extract data from
it.

I agree incompatible data should be removed from OSM but it makes no
sense for a normal user to go around deleting it because they have no
way to remove the information from the odbl database, which includes
the history of edits.  This can be done by "redacting" that data and
the DWG currently has this ability.  Also, as the beginning of this
thread showed, a user is unlikely to know what licenses or agreements
there are between the source and the OSM contributor.

Cheer

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Re: [OSM-talk] Data copied from Google Maps

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 4 November 2012 02:06, Paul Johnson  wrote:
> On Saturday, November 3, 2012, Ian Sergeant wrote:
>>
>> On 04/11/12 07:24, Paul Johnson wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Would it be acceptable to use Street View to aid your memory of local
>>> knowledge of the ground truth?  Something that's on the tip of your brain
>>> and you have actually been there, but can't remember what a specific sign
>>> said?
>>>
>>
>> Next time, write it down or take a photo.
>>
>> For now, either get written permission from Google that you can use
>> Streetview to populate their main mapping competitor's database, or go and
>> check, or wait for someone else to check.
>>
>> We have decided that we want to be whiter-than-white, and not tiptoe
>> through a legal minefield.
>
>
> I understand that, but I mean as a memory aid for places you have actually
> been to.

Here's something that Ed Parsons said in an email about Google
StreetView usage in OSM:

> the relevant clause in the terms of service is..
>
> 2(e) use the Products in a manner that gives you or any other person access 
> to mass downloads or bulk feeds of any Content, including but not limited to 
> numerical latitude or longitude coordinates, imagery, and visible map data;
>
> so checking the odd street names is OK.. but every street name I would 
> suggest would represent a bulk feed."

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-talk-fr] Continued aggression against French contributors (cadastre integration)

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 19 October 2012 09:17, Simon Poole  wrote:
> ..
> The UMP imports show nicely how broken at least object level source
> tagging is, a large number of objects have/were infected by source tags
> from UMP imports without actually being derived from such data requiring
> heuristics to determine if they could be kept or not.

I disagree, what you're seeing is a result of a redaction logic based
on individual OSM entity's history.  As Frederik wrote in an email
probably over two years ago, anything relying on the object Id
persistence is outright broken.  This is exactly what the bot logic
relied on and fixing it will require heuristics.

Tagging entire changesets is at least equally broken because it
"infects" the clean edits in the changeset, while objects who's Id
changes later may be wrongly detected as clean.  It's a bigger
tradeoff.

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Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-talk-fr] Continued aggression against French contributors (cadastre integration)

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 18 October 2012 23:05, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
> In a recent message, to talk-it
> (http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-it/2012-September/030778.html),
> Paul writes
>
> "We recognize that the line between an import and assisted mapping is not
> currently clearly defined; however all the cases I have seen recently
> clearly were on the import side of that line."
>
> So he calls it "assisted mapping", I called it "using a variety of legal
> third-party material in the mapping process", we could also call it "a
> manually verified, small-scale import".
>
> These things are ok and while it is not currently written, DWG does not
> enforce separate accounts for them. If that is any help, we can try to sit
> down together and try to clarify the line between "assisted mapping" and
> "import".
>
> There are many reasons why we want mass imports clearly separated from
> normal, human-contributed data. We got burnt by this in the license change
> in Poland, where we had to spend massive amounts of time sorting between
> "good" and "bad" changesets contributed by the same account.

This is off topic in this thread, but I'd like to set the record
straight.  Who do you refer to as "we" when you say you had to spend
any time sorting those changes?  The LWG and the rest of the
contributors to the license change have done nothing at all to
understand what data in Poland was compatible with the new license and
which of it wasn't.  You might have noticed (or not) that pretty much
every sentence in LWG minutes referring to this data has a factual
error of some sort, especially the ones quoting any numbers.  Really.
This was on such a scale that the day before the redaction started
(Tuseday morning) I was asking people on #osm-dev including LWG
members and the bot operator, if any of the decisions made by LWG to
that time had in fact been taken into account.  What I learnt was that
the final rules to be applied by the bot were such that over 50% of
the data to be redacted by the bot in Poland was in fact compatible
with ODbL, while at the same over 50% of the data incompatible with
ODbL would be left in the database.  Completely nothing had been done
to that time.

(And even then there was not much will to do anything right.  I was
told that if I wanted to provide drop-in code to fix the basic
problems, then I had about 12 hours to do so -- that was another
statement that made Michael's Collins' "reasonable effort" and "due
diligence" simply laughable.  On that same day, the operator of the
bot had literally said that it was not his task to read LWG's meeting
minutes and implement those plans.  A week later when it turned out
that a human mistake caused too many objects to be redacted (mind you
those objects have not been unredacted to this day -- a joke on the
automated edits guideline where you're supposed to have the tools to
undo anything you do), another community member had come to #osm-dev
to ask about this and was quoted an hourly rate for programming work
by one of the OSMF board members for repairing the destruction done to
that contributor's work)

So I'll appreciate it if you can avoid saying that you'd spent time
sorting through any changesets (or have you and that work was simply
not used?).  I had agreed to provide the whitelists and blacklists
needed for the bot to approximate what would be a license-based
redaction because I felt responsible to both the Polish OSM community
and the authors of the CC-By-SA data to be removed, for what the OSM
project does with those people's contributions.  I had quit the OSMF
to avoid the responsibility for their movements.  But at that time I
had already spend *weeks* of programming work trying to help the OSMF
destroy less by writing the equivalent of the redaction bot to go
through UMP edits history.  And because of that decision I have even
spent a couple hours this last weekend helping the OSMF do *more*
destruction to free geographic data in the OSM database, instead of
doing something productive.

Now coming back to the question of dedicated import accounts, I don't
see they make a lot of difference.  They're not a huge burden to the
importer, but they neither do solve any problem that the source
tagging doesn't solve better already.  If you want to redact the OSM
database ignoring basic facts and information that has been provided
to you clearly and repeatedly by different people then not much is
going to help you.  Still the UMP imports usually have required days
to weeks of manual work before each changeset uploaded because of the
data model differences and I think you could easily put them in the
"assisted import" category.  Which would mean that there's more manual
work in them than 3-rd party and using either a separate account, or
entire-changeset tagging, would cause more false negatives than not.
You could do that work in smaller changesets but you'd lose the
atomicity or "bisectability" in git speak, where you'd have a map
state in between the begi

Re: [OSM-talk] Import guidelines proposal update

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 20 September 2012 08:02, Greg Troxel  wrote:
> I'm mostly a lurker in these discussions, and generally more pro-import
> than many who participate in import decisions.  But I find the 'separate
> account for import' to be an utterly reasonable (along with the rest of
> the guidlines), easy to follow rule, and I am boggled by the objections
> to it.

I haven't followed all of this thread, but here's my experience with
this rule or recommendation.  First of all setting the username
through which you're uploading your edit is such a small issue that it
doesn't really matter for the person uploading. But then I don't see
it as solving any problem compared to source= tagging either on
objects being uploaded, or changeset (often the granularity provided
by tagging entire changesets is completely unpractical and would
result in more than 50% false positives).

Secondly I don't see it as an overwhelming trend currently in OSM.

Thirdly it introduces the problem of how many import accounts to use,
what to name them and potential anonymity of the person uploading the
changes if the account name doesn't contain their nickname.  In the
Spanish community there has been a strong will to follow all the
import guidelines when the Corine Land Cover dataset was being
discussed, analysed and prepared for importing.  The import guidelines
wiki page gave everyone the idea that it would be best to use a single
collective account with the same login details used by all the people
participating.  It's now obvious that this wasn't a good idea because
it was difficult to contact the person who did the actual work in case
there was a need for discussion, on top of that there's the practical
problem of sharing login details.  As with most imports there's days
or weeks (sometimes months) of manual processing that needs to be done
before data is ready for upload to OSM, and this is done by a real
person.  I think the whole point of having accounts in OSM is for the
people uploading their work to be easily contactable.

Fast forward two years and the current (lasting for about a year now)
Spanish cadastre discussions and import attempts have an even stronger
push to follow all the import guidelines because the DWG has blocked
these import attempts on various occasions (which from my point of
view is continuing to damage OSM in Spain because mappers are left in
a limbo -- there's no point drawing building outlines in their towns
from imagery if they have a better source at hand).  Well, this time a
single import account has been registered per province with a single
person coordinating the (potential) imports in each province.  The
assignments have been documented on the wiki.  This is better but the
account names are still not directly linked with real people, and the
division by provinces is artificial because the data was supposed to
be uploaded by users only for the areas they know personally, which
may be on village level for example.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Import guidelines proposal update

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 20 September 2012 00:41, Richard Fairhurst  wrote:
> Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>> I believe that dedicated accounts are generally better for
>> imports than using "mixed" ones which are also used for
>> original data. This really helps a lot in sorting data
>> according to its intellectual properties holders.
>
> Yes, absolutely.
>
> The really obvious example of this is the Polish UMP data, which was
> licensed CC-BY-SA and could not be kept post-licence change. If dedicated
> accounts had been used, removing this data would have been relatively easy;
> in reality, it has been (and continues to be) a nightmare. :(

I think this is a counter example as it is well known which data is
imported, and it is still a nightmare.  The imported data is marked in
a way that was standard for imports, and continues to be used for
local TIGER 2011 imports for example.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OT - Unusual Bing imagery

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 24 July 2012 03:48, Alan Mintz  wrote:
> At 2012-07-23 16:02, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
>> The area in the screenshot seems to have a higher resolution than
>> satellites can achieve.
>
>
> Is this documented somewhere? Assuming from the look and ratio of
> measurements of the jet that it is a B737, the pic is at z20 (~12cm/pel @
> middle lats). I was under the impression that all of the Bing/Yahoo/Google
> imagery was still satellite-based, down to z21 (6cm/pel). I know Google has
> spots of "UHR" imagery at z22, but it seems they were still referred to as
> satellite. I've seen individual county websites with very nice imagery
> described as "flyover", as though coming from airplane/helicopter,
> apparently on a contract basis.

I've assumed 0.5m/px is the technical limit for satellite imaging,
Wikipedia seems to confirm this more or less:
"The latest commercial satellite (GeoEye 1) has a GSD of 0.41 m
(effectively 0.5 m due to United States Government restrictions on
civilian imaging)."[1] I guess military satellites might have better
parameters, but anything you're likely to see on the web with a higher
resolution will be taken from within the troposphere.

I've been told once that 0.5m is the usual limit around the world
except Israel of which you're unlikely to see imagery better than 2m
due to the government's threats.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OT - Unusual Bing imagery

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 24 July 2012 00:52, Hendrik Oesterlin  wrote:
>> http://greenvilleopenmap.info/Airplane.jpg
>
> If you give the location of this image, it would be possible to look
> for its shadow and calculate an approximate altitude.
>
> The Bing imagerie could be satellite imagerie, not necessarily air
> plane imagerie.

The area in the screenshot seems to have a higher resolution than
satellites can achieve.  Also I've stumbled on big airliners in Yahoo
or Bing satellite imagery before and they look much different (longer
exposition time and the RGB components somehow have an offset because
of the altitude difference, like here:
http://www.streetviewfun.com/2010/airplane-on-satellite-image-2/)

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Re: [OSM-talk] Very not happy

[andrzej zaborowski]

Peter,

On 22 July 2012 09:27, Peter Wendorff  wrote:
> Am 22.07.2012 00:42, schrieb andrzej zaborowski:
>> If you're asking me (not Maetma 91), I think the problem has been
>> known since the early days of OSMI license view (easily fixable too).
>> For example this city I believe was showing as clean although it was a
>> while since I have looked at that layer: http://osm.org/go/0MtRfiBy-
>>
>> Here's a before/after the bot run comparison someone made for that
>> city: http://postimage.org/image/sv7gh0rkp/
>> http://postimage.org/image/8m60yvx8j/
>
> First of all that's not the ID(s) Frederik asked for.
> Secondly: if it has been known to you - did you provide a patch or at least
> a patch idea for it?

Wow, I wonder how people manage to ignore so many facts.  First of
all, I have not been silent about it, quite the opposite and the issue
must have been known to Frederik because I remember he participated in
one of the mailing list threads about it in mid 2011.

Secondly no one could provide such a patch because no one knows what
the bot is going to remove and what the LWG will deem clean or dirty,
the real discussions about "what will the bot do" started on the
rebuild list just a couple of months ago.  So are you even serious
about the patch suggestion?

In this particular case I have been discussing this issue with Simon
Poole of the LWG on IRC the day before the but ran (Tuesday last week)
and in the morning he decided that the objects would stay and
apparently later the same day changed his mind (I hope I'm not
misrepresenting what happened, if I am, sorry).

> If it has been known before that there has been an error, then you cannot
> complain about it suddenly being deleted against the OSMI view - because
> obviously you knew about that already.

Oh my, please re-read the conversation.  I haven't been complaining, I
was not a user of OSMI.  I simply pointed out a gross error in
somebody's statement.  Someone said something that was incorrect and
very ironic in face of how much people's hard work has been removed,
all I said is that this was incorrect.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Very not happy

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 21 July 2012 15:07, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
>>> That's quite incorrect, millions of objects that were not flagged in
>>> those tools have been removed,
>
> Can both of you give us the object IDs of a couple of these objects to
> investigate?

If you're asking me (not Maetma 91), I think the problem has been
known since the early days of OSMI license view (easily fixable too).
For example this city I believe was showing as clean although it was a
while since I have looked at that layer: http://osm.org/go/0MtRfiBy-

Here's a before/after the bot run comparison someone made for that
city: http://postimage.org/image/sv7gh0rkp/
http://postimage.org/image/8m60yvx8j/

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Re: [OSM-talk] Very not happy

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 21 July 2012 00:55, Lester Caine  wrote:
> Maetma 91 wrote:
>>
>> I do that.
>> JOSM plugin say no problem
>> and now you break everything
>
> The licence check tools would have been showing problems. Nothing has been
> removed that was not flagged in those tools.

That's quite incorrect, millions of objects that were not flagged in
those tools have been removed, while millions of others that showed
red (that's not an exaggeration, I don't know how many but it's over
three millions that I know of) were in fact ODbL-clean and may end up
not being removed.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Changing capitalization (Lima)

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 31 May 2012 17:39, Alex Barth  wrote:
> We're currently working with Ruben (user Rub21) on fixing street name 
> capitalization in Lima - a lot of the street names are ALL CAPS where they 
> should be properly capitalized. We're doing this work manually right now and 
> are well under way. It's quite time intensive though - any examples of where 
> such a cleanup process has been automated on OSM before?
>

I ran such a process on the POI names in Girona that were imported
just before the SOTM'10.  Accents were correct already and python
dealt with them correctly.  The only special cases were some
prepositions that are written in lower case and the Catalan use of
apostrophe.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/5073672 is one of the changesets.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM : It's a shame !!!

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 29 May 2012 11:01, Thomas Davie  wrote:
> If I remember correctly (someone correct me if I don't), a lawyer has agreed 
> that it's okay to keep node positions and ways where a user would reasonably 
> have created the same way from an ODbL compatible data source.

I don't know if a lawyer has said that, but I think it's unlikely to
apply to tracing from imagery, first because the node positions are so
unlikely to match if recreated from imagery, and secondly because
Potlatch, I think, now has a whole mode designed to get rid of
original node positions and add new ones quickly.  (It's still a huge
simplification with many open questions -- what about the
directionality of ways where the direction is not significant, i.e. no
oneway=yes tag -- this information could constitute a protected
database on its own but all the "remapping" methods retain such
information.)

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM : It's a shame !!!

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 29 May 2012 11:28, Thomas Davie  wrote:
> On 29 May 2012, at 10:27, Floris Looijesteijn wrote:
>
>> That's some great imagery if he can read the name signs on that street...
>
> The fact that all the tags were ODbL safe had already been established – they 
> were created by another user who had accepted.

Acceptance of the Contributor Terms does *not* imply ODbL safety.

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Re: [OSM-talk] [Osmf-talk] OSM : It's a shame !!!

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 28 May 2012 21:42, ce-test, qualified testing bv - Gert Gremmen
 wrote:
...
> Why is there no tool for checking on copy paste copyright infringement…

Copying and pasting is not a copyright infringement.  The Contributor
Terms don't require that the data inserted into the database be
compatible with ODbL -- only the current licensing terms, which still
means CC-By-SA.  Otherwise many many normal edits would also
constitute an infringement.

The infringement will occur if the OSM Foundation decides to publish
the database under the ODbL based on the CT-acceptance.

The problem has been discussed many times on the legal-talk@ list,
most of the times with the same conclusion, including opinions by a
copyright lawyer.  The LWG hasn't reacted as far as I've seen.
Neither has any recent part of the license change process been legally
reviewed, as far as I know again.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Import of buildings in Chicago

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 27 May 2012 18:11, Colin Smale  wrote:
> On 27/05/2012 17:54, Worst Fixer wrote:
>>
>> Hello.
>>
>> There is on going import of Buildings in city Chicago.
>>
>> Import is held by following account:
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/chicago-buildings
>>
>> I found no discussions of this import. No announcement. I searched bad?
>>
>> It is absent from following web page:
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue
>>
>> I want know why importer uses following tags:
>>
>> * chicago:building_id (314 330 objects, used by 2 users).
>>
>> I sent letter to importer, and he said he will not import this tag any
>> more. But, he continues to. No justification of need for tag was given.
>>
> Who has the right to ban a tag? Where does it say that a tag has to be
> justified?

The DWG has the right to block imports with unjustified tags and has
done that on many occasions, and also made it clear on the imports@
list that this would happen.  It's also documented on the wiki.

However the partial street name tags have been discussed on talk-us@
several times and were considered to be useful.  I'd also say that a
single "id" tag referring to another database may be useful and not an
overkill to the OSM database.  Not saying that the precise tagging
shouldn't have been discussed beforehand.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Worst of OSM

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 15 May 2012 15:37, Pieren  wrote:
> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Kate Chapman  wrote:
>> Personally I think it is discouraging. I think positive encouragement
>> is much better than this negative method.
>
> The problem is that this page is mixing real mistakes (mainly bad
> imports) and areas where the geodata do not comply with the author
> priorities or what the author thinks about what should be mapped first
> (mainly good imports). He is probably restrained by his personal
> experience where mapping must start with major roads, places names
> then minor roads, all with GPS and then, landuse, buildings,
> addresses, etc with hires aerial imagery, all surveyed by an army of
> local enthusiasts.

The site seems to mostly make fun of the current resulting state of
the map, rather than the process that led to that state.  I'd compare
it to http://googlemapsfail.tumblr.com/ rather than argue whether it
is useful to OSM or not.  If it hadn't been created now, someone else
would create one at some later point.

Maybe the fact that it's German (assuming that it is) is a sign of
OSM's popularity there, and approaching Google Maps.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Proposed mechanical edit: Empty Relations

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 13 April 2012 11:12, Paul Norman  wrote:
> Through editor errors or other mistakes there are a number of relations in
> OSM which have no members. I propose a mechanical edit to delete these where
> they are not members of some other way. My proposed procedure, documented at
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mechanical_Edits/pnorman_imports is to
> identify these with my pgsnapshot database and delete them if they aren't
> referenced by any other relation.
>
> If they are referenced by another relation I will investigate them and deal
> with them manually.
>
> I've investigated a few of them and they appear to be caused by people
> deleting ways from multipolygons but not deleting the relation. I don't want
> to investigate all 5200 by hand so I'm proposing the mechanical edit.
>
> I will filter out ones touched in the last 24 hours to avoid conflicting
> with anyone.

This thread comes up every some time
(http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2009-August/016658.html,
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2010-November/055075.html).
 In 2009 I ran a very similar operation with 4.5k relations deleted as
discussed in the first thread I linked.  The lesson from it was that
some relations are referenced from outside of the database, mainly
from the OSM wiki.  Those should not be deleted automatically either
or it'll upset some users.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Komuna e Malishevës, Serbia ?

[andrzej zaborowski]

2012/4/4 kmilos :
> The fact that you you sign off as and support the 'Free Libre Open Source
> Software KosovA' discredits you from any meaningful discussion, and any
> claims of the good-willed intentions of an organization bearing such a name.

The fact that you look at who makes a claim before considering the
arguments they have demonstrated the claim to be true with discredits
you from any discussion at all I guess.

The "on the ground rule" really is the best, and generally agreed way
in this project, to avoid political decisions and avoid having a
database of unverifiable information.  It's the same way linguists
define natural languages -- a language is what its users use, no
national or international body has the power to overrule that.

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Re: [OSM-talk] No Data overlay on OpenStreetmap.org

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 2 April 2012 16:50, Kai Krueger  wrote:
>
> andrzej zaborowski wrote
>>
>> There's a problem though
>> with re-opening the data pane once it's been closed.  I have to reload
>> the website to reopen it every time
>>
> That should be fixed already. Are you still seeing this?

Seems to be Ok now, but I could reproduce the problem in the morning.
Thanks for fixing and sorry I couldn't send a fix.

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Re: [OSM-talk] No Data overlay on OpenStreetmap.org

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 2 April 2012 09:40, Steve Doerr  wrote:
> On 01/04/2012 21:30, Shaun McDonald wrote:
>
> It has been moved to the edit tab under the name "Browse Map Data".
>
>
> Not currently working for me. I get
>
> Error in loading GML file
> /api/0.6/map?bbox=0.34649,51.421383,0.351724,51.423823
>
>
>
> then click OK. There's now a link on the left that says 'Retrieve this area
> from the API' but when I click on that I get
>
> Internal Server Error

That's because of the server maintenance.  There's a problem though
with re-opening the data pane once it's been closed.  I have to reload
the website to reopen it every time, otherwise it causes a

'null' is not an object @ openstreetmap-.js:128

(Safari)

+1 for putting it back in the layer switcher.

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Re: [OSM-talk] iPhoto for iOS Not Using Google Maps

[andrzej zaborowski]

2012/3/9 Jaakko Helleranta.com :
> Jaime wrote: "My guess is that, at least in my area, they are mixing OSM 
> geometries and names with -very poor- labels from other source."
>
> ... Which would mean that (mixing and matching data in an area) they should 
> be contributing back to OSM, eih?

It has been suggested on IRC that they used GeoNames, which does
sometimes have very-strange-but-not-completely-wrong names.  But
GeoNames is already under a compatible license as far as I know.

> Would that poor old local name of Madrid be old_alt_loc_name=[whatever] in 
> OSM terms??

I checked the edits history and it wasn't under any of those tags, but
it would make sense to add it as loc_name, as people might sometimes
use Madriles in their search queries and such. :)  But it's not a name
you'd want to display on a serious map.

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Re: [OSM-talk] iPhoto for iOS Not Using Google Maps

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 8 March 2012 01:06, Richard Fairhurst  wrote:
> Spod wrote:
>> http://512pixels.net/iphoto-for-ios-not-using-google-maps/
>
> http://www.refnum.com/tmp/apple.html (thanks Dair!) will show you the tiles
> they're using.
>
> Seems to be TIGER in the States but OSM in lots of other places...

Great :) -- Madrid is rendered with a name worthy of a map prank,
although it would fit loc_name too.  (The edits history for the
relevant node doesn't show it ever being in OSM though)

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Re: [OSM-talk] FourSquare and OSM

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 2 March 2012 23:00, Frans Thamura  wrote:
> does this mean that OSM API is not usefull for integration?

What Toby says is they don't need to use the API.  They source the
tiles from mapbox, who in turn use the OSM planet files or diffs as
their interface to OSM.  And they use leaflet as their javascript
thing.

The OSM toolchain, like Unix, is naturally made up of small utilities
each of which solves one problem at a time.

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] Contact And Remap Campaign

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 13 February 2012 18:17, Simon Poole  wrote:
> Am 13.02.2012 17:44, schrieb andrzej zaborowski:
>> (I assume you mean CC-By-SA)
>>
>> Simon, I would like to know what your interpretation of the current
>> Contributor Terms version is, I know what LWG's interpretation is from
>> their meeting minutes and it must be different from your
>> interpretation.  If by "declared good" you mean declared
>> ODbL-compatible then there's nothing special in Poland because nothing
>> has been declared good.  The acceptance of CT, according to LWG (and
>> to my reading of CT 1.2.4) is not such a declaration, it is orthogonal
>> to ODbL compatibility.  There's no basis for anyone to assume such a
>> thing, worldwide not only in Poland.
>
> I believe there is some contention as to what in 1.a "current licence terms"
> refers to, but it is at least consistent with the document to assume that it
> refers to the licences listed in 3., so both CC-by-SA 2.0 and ODbL + DbCL1.0
> , implying that any imports have to be compatible with both*. I can't put my
> finger on an formal statement by the LWG that would indicate otherwise, can
> you?

I can't either, only a rather informal statement.  My understandng is
that "current license terms" would be what osm.org/copyright says.
You're right that it would also make sense to look at what point 3.
says in the same document, but it's unobvious enough that it didn't
occur to me or the people I talked to about it.

In any case that's very little for a basis for a legal decision.

>
>
>
>>
>> Secondly as you know CC-By-SA licensed data has been contributed by
>> CT-accepters outside of Poland too and I wouldn't be surprised if it's
>> being contributed today taking advantage of the "current license"
>> still being the CC one.  It is not only through (what we call)
>> imports.
>
>
> How can it be other than an "import", either a derivative or original work
> covered by CC-by-SA 2.0?

Take the example of NearMap TOS, tracing NearMap (specially aided by
local knowledge) is not something we tend to call an import.

>
>
>
>>
>> Even if it were through imports only, then I can't make out what you
>> mean by "erroneously".  First of all the imports in Poland have been
>> documented in the imports catalogue on the wiki, so this was in
>> keeping with the community guidelines as well as the CT.  This is not
>> true of the hundreds of local, smaller imports that are happening
>> every day (see the imported streets in Lima, or see the Santa Rosa
>> town in the El Oro canton of Ecuador and the nearby towns, and tell me
>> what their original license was) especially in non-English-speaking
>> countries, where the Contributor Terms is the only "binding" document.
>>  The community guidelines are really guidelines of the part of the
>> community contributing to the talk@ list and the English wiki, a tip
>> of an iceberg.
>
>
> Naturally due to the nature of the project the amount of control that can be
> exerted over what is actually included in the database is limited, but that
> has absolutely nothing specific to do the the OdBL or the CC-by-SA 2.0 (it
> applies just as much to people importing stuff from commercial data sources
> which are compatible with neither etc.).

Right.  Yet I know you can defend a decision based on a license given
to you by someone or a contract you signed with someone, like the CT.
It would be much harder to defend a decision made based on something
that is specifically omitted from that contract (when it exists), and
depends on timing, language background etc.  I.e. the wiki and
friends.

>
>
> And yes I would be all for a zero tolerance stance and a tight regime on
> imports, but alas that is somewhat at odds with the touchy-feely nature of
> the project.

I know you would :)  From my observation you're in a small minority
though (obviously not alone)

(BTW I think that a license change should be treated at least as
seriously as an import, i.e. there should be the rule "if you can't do
it 100% correctly then don't do it."  In an import a technical or
legal or social difficulty is not an excuse to go on with the import
anyway.  In the imports I participated in, this was a rule and it
meant many complex technical problems had to be resolved, new
algorithms written and so on.  Lack of time was not an excuse either.
It's sad to see the LWG is not limited by the same rules others are.
Even something ultimately quite easy as detecting splits and merges,
is too difficult to bother with.. that's despite an OSMF member
previously saying "anything that's based on object id persistence is
broken" publicly and not being contested)

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] Bing imagery

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 11 February 2012 01:33, Andrew Errington  wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 04:03:01 Douglas Musaazi wrote:
> Don't forget- sometimes Bing imagery is not accurately aligned.  You should
> double-check the alignment of the images before tracing from them.  Potlatch
> and JOSM have tools which will allow you to move the images to correct the
> alignment.
...
>
> I have found that the offset from one area will work within a radius of about
> 50km, but it's worth checking in different areas.

Depends on the area, but there are places where the offset direction
is different at points just 5 km apart, in other words the image is
rotated, scaled, warped -- not only offset.

But the newly added Bing imagery is said to be rather well calibrated.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] Contact And Remap Campaign

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 10 February 2012 10:47, Richard Fairhurst  wrote:
> andrzej zaborowski wrote:
>> I honestly found it strange that RichardF would insist on
>> 80n selecting one of the options.. really, what's the
>> point?
>
> It's a courtesy thing. If you're going to refuse, have the decency to say
> so, so that your fellow OSMeres know whether they'll be able to use your
> contributions under the new licence and terms. Most people don't seem to
> have a problem with clicking the button but there are one or two that do.

It would be a courtesy to do something that is of any benefit to
OSMers, of any significance, but that's not the case.

Secondly you can ask someone a courtesy if you're going to do
something for them too.  For example if you maintain a software
project, you can tell them to avoid "goto" in their patch -- makes no
difference but it's a courtesy.  The expectation is that if they do it
then you can merge their code into the project.  In this case 80n and
others (me included) are asking osmf to stop abusing its position to
harm this project as well as anyone who needs geodata under CC-By-SA,
and you're responding "no way in hell" and still asking a favour.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] Contact And Remap Campaign

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 9 February 2012 06:17, Nick Hocking  wrote:
> Graham Jones wrote
>
> "I completely agree - we should assume that no response is equivalent to
> consent - if they complain about this action we can delete their data when
> they show enough interest to actually decline the licence/terms.  Qui tacet
> consentire"
>
> There is one problem with this.
>
> There are people who are remaining "undecided" so that
> remappers will leave their work alone in the vain hope that the
> undecider votes in our favour.

Yay for speculation.

First of all the only difference between undecided and declined is
that if someone declines you know that they've seen the message and
know about the OSM's change process.  I think this is the only purpose
of the "decline" button, which at the beginning I thought was
spurious.  I honestly found it strange that RichardF would insist on
80n selecting one of the options.. really, what's the point?
Specially since you know 80n knows about the change.

>
> Then at the last moment they will decline, thus ensuring maximum
> damage to the OSM database on April 1st.

Why should they decline?  It will make no difference whatsoever at that point.

>
> So, If we decide to now accept an undeciders work then remappers will
> surely leave it alone and then when the undecider turns into a decliner
> on or after the changeover date, then they will have succedded in damaging
> our database.
>
> Therefore if we decide to auto-accept an undeciders work, this decision
> must be irreversible and must be taken soon (within the week).
>
> Otherwise we should remap the undeciders roads as fast as possible.
>
> I guess (IANAL) that maybe if we do take over the undeciders work and
> they complain, then we could remove that data at OUR liesure by remapping it
> one way at a time,over the next year or so.

I'm not sure LWG would like that since they became allergic to
CC-By-SA.  Having any CC-By-SA data in the database would mean that
OSMF has to comply with the share-alike clause and I think there
exists a probability that a court would order OSMF to do that (only
publish osm data under CC-By-SA) in case of a conflict in court.
(ianal either)

But then it doesn't seem like the LWG is willing to really clear the
database of CC-By-SA-only work, so it may be the case anyway.

Of course if you say that OSM is a joint work (as Russ Nelson
suggested) and anyone can re-license under any license they like so
far as they share the profits then it doesn't matter because anyone
can use OSM under CC-By-SA.  But I also think that there are enough
examples of share-alike licenses actually working, that a court
anywhere might not accept the "joint work" interpretation.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] Critical Mass for license change-over

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 27 January 2012 21:52, Toby Murray  wrote:
> Specific questions that need an answer:
> 1) As Nathan pointed out, nothing currently looks at way
> splitting/combining.

While I think it is important to implement the detection of
split/combined ways in the final algorithm, I don't think it changes
the statistics Mike Collinson quoted by a lot because splits and
merges by CT-accepting users will even out with those by non-accepting
users.

> ...
> 3) will the odbl=clean tag be respected? We are closing in on 15,000
> uses of this tag.

The biggest issue I see with this tag is that people are setting it
based the CT-acceptance of users in the object history.  But really
(and this is confirmed in various LWG minutes) CT-acceptance doesn't
imply ODbL compatibility.  The "odbl=clean" tag on the other hand does
seem to imply ODbL-compatibility.  So really you're only entitled to
set odbl=clean on an object if all the information that remains is
either:

 * your own work, or,
 * from sources that you know are ODbL compatible, like survey by
someone you know or import from a Public Domain source.  There's no
legal basis to assume every user showing green in the license tools is
ODbL "clean" and if you make that assumption you're putting OSMF in an
unclean situation.

I think this is the biggest issue before LWG.  To make the switch to
ODbL real, they need to come up with a corrected version of
Contributor Terms and start asking mappers to accept it ASAP.  (the
other reason the majority of contracts firmed between contributors and
OSMF may be considered invalid is that the users who clicked "Accept"
until December were shown an incomplete text of the CT due to a bug)

---
BTW here's my answer to Mike Collinson's question I wrote in March 2011:

"I think here you have to use a sort of a logarithmic scale
and I hope the license change working group is going to use that scale
when/if they're deciding whether the moment is right to remove data
from the editable database.

7% or 45% or 62% are all insignificantly small if you think of the
amount of map data that remains incompatible.  Even 98% is
insignificantly small if this means that 2% of the userbase's data is
going to be dropped.  For the license change to not leave the project
dead, the number needs to be really close to 100% of the user
collected (i.e. not imported) data.  1% of a couple hunderds GB is
really a lot of data, 0.1% is still probably more than some of the
individual country extracts, and then 0.01% is probably an amount that
we could afford losing if everyone put a lot of effort in fixing the
breakage.
"

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] Critical Mass for license change-over

[andrzej zaborowski]

Nick,

On 28 January 2012 05:43, Nick Hocking  wrote:
> NE2/NE3 (Nathan) wrote
>
> "This condescending tone isn't useful. We should all care about the
> entire map, not just our little area."

So which part of this quote do you not agree with?

>
>
> Nathan,
>
> someone who sprouts thing such as  (quote)
>
> Now you can see how much vandalism the OSMF will carry out on April Fools
>
> (end quote)
>
> can not really expect to be taken too seriously here.

Are you responding to the part of NE2's email you quoted, or are you
only looking at the sender?  Try reading what people say before
looking at who says it.  If LWG is an authority to you and you're the
type of person with a great sense of authority then there's no chance
of you ever even considering an argument of someone who doesn't think
the license change is a step forward, is there?

I assume the issue you have with NE2's older message is the
classification of the planned action as vandalism.  But really it is
strictly a logical consequence of not blindly assuming that the
license change process (in which the change from CC-By-SA to ODbL is
the smallest part) is good for the project.  If you think it's not
vandalism then why not and why would you not explain it in the
relevant thread?  Or maybe it's the assumption that if map data is
severed in an organised way then it doesn't count as vandalism any
more?  I'm really only trying to understand what your line of argument
is because all you said above is "Nathan, you're obviously wrong".

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] Mixing OSM and FOSM data

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 18 January 2012 17:22, Jo  wrote:
> If these people's contributions to those objects were 'negligeable' then
> reverting those objects may hardly have an effect. They show green so we
> don't have to waste precious time 'fixing' them.
> If what those people contributed is not present anymore in the current
> version, then why would other contributors better/improved/corrected
> contributions be the ones that would disappear? If those contributors feel
> 'cheated', then there is something wrong with the way they think about their
> contributions and maybe it would have been better that they hadn't
> contributed to a project with a free license in the first place.

In one of the cases I'm talking about, those people never had the
intention to deal with OpenStreetMap, they had a similar project to
OSM under CC-By-SA long before OSM existed.  Now OSM uses their map
data and entire cities initially imported from their project are shown
green.  This is a consequence of how LWG wrote the Contibutor Terms
and the cleanness-criteria.

The people in question might agree to ODbL, discussions are happening,
they're good-willing, but for that we need to stick to facts on both
sides.

>
> I can understand people when they can't agree to the CT's for a variety of
> reasons, but why they would feel 'cheated' when the rest of us are merely
> trying to continue where they left off minimizing the damage, is beyond me.

And this is something I can not understand.  Say that you're
contributing to a project with some purpose or license.  Now a
subgroup of contributors wants to change this and continue without any
losses.  If the original contributors don't think the new direction is
correct, why should they all have to help that subgroup?

>
> Anyway, I'm sure that if they give us a list of objects they feel should
> disappear and what their contribution to that object was, that the rest of
> us will oblige and take out those bits of information from those objects,
> before recreating them. Thank you very much.

That's the kind of youtube approach to licensing (it's ok to infringe
the license unless the authors complain) which I think was a no no in
OpenStreetMap until some time ago, the goal was to be whiter than
white and this has obviously changed.  This is why I don't think
Russ's claim that osmf's approach is "conservative" is correct.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM downtime as protest against SOPA?

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 17 January 2012 01:19, Sven Clement  wrote:
> Hey!
>
> Why not reconfigure mapnik to render the US boundary polygon with a
> black fill during the sopablackout?
>
> Would send a message without influencing HOT ;)

It would be tricky because the affected tiles would have to be removed
from the cache before and after the blackout.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] The aim of OpenStreetView

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 6 January 2012 12:04, LM_1  wrote:
> Hi,
> What is the aim of OpenStreetView - Is it a potential Google
> StreetView counterpart intended for viewing by general public (And
> therefore all photos must be nice, high technical quality, blue sky,
> around noon) ORIs it a help tool for OSM mappers (and therefore it is
> important what can be used as mapping support and the photos can be
> less nice, bad weather, dark - as long as they are informative)?

It's something in between I think.  In terms of Google maps it would
be the counterpart of panoramio maybe?  See
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetView

There's another project called OpenStreetPhoto with the aim you
mentioned second.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] Editing of content that will be deleted on April 1st

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 21 December 2011 15:06, Ed Loach  wrote:
>> On 13 December 2011 23:03, David Earl
>>  wrote:
>> > What are the precise, numeric criteria for proceeding? At the
>> moment even by
>> > a vague definition I don't see how one could describe it as a
>> critical mass.
>>
>> I'm responding to this old thread because now I think whoever
>> made the
>> criteria could have answered the question asked here.  But really
>> there's probably no answer because the date was pulled out of thin
>> air.
>
> Well, I'm not on any committee, but I find it hard how anyone can't
> think there is a critical mass. Over 95% of the data will be
> retained, and this figure is increasing weekly both due to new
> acceptances and of course ongoing mapping by those who have already
> accepted.

I'm not claiming that's a bad date, just trying to find an explanation
to how the decision process works (and why David Earl's question would
never be answered).  I'm seeing the license process has run over most
of the project's normal working rules by now.  For example (but really
these are some of many details):

* the currently proposed "What is clear" criteria based on a
individual object's history.  A couple of months ago [1] Frederik
wrote:
"There are a number of other reasons why IDs could "break". [...]
Relying on numeric IDs is never going to work, and there is no way how
this could be made to work in the future."
And now the whole process which is supposed to be legally sound is
supposed to work based on those IDs.  It's trivial to detect merges,
splits, and tag copy/pasting specially since the changesets have been
introduced and most usual edits happen inside a single changeset.
Considering that first year IT students have to implement pattern
recognition that can read text there's really no technical excuse to
not detect that nodes that belonged to one way now belong to another.

* at the same time proposed is a "meta" tag odbl= that is further from
the on the round rule than perhaps any other tagging devised until
now.  The "don't tag for the render" rule (where renderer refers to
any particular tool using the OSM *map* database) has just gone down
the drain.

* the body who's supposed to "support rather than govern" the project
is on its way to remove map data.  Tangentially, note that the CT
1.2.4 document, which over a hundred thousand people has been made
accept, has been written in such a way that it doesn't disallow
ODbL-incompatible data being contributed, and people have accepted the
terms on that basis [2].  In effect no one can know what is or isn't
incompatible.  But Frederik's and Simon Poole's visualisations in some
ways imply that whatever passes the "What is clean" test is ODbL
compatible and possibly any free-and-open-license-compatible.  As a
result several of my friend mappers are under attack from authors of
CC-By-SA data which now shows as green on those visualisations.  It's
very hard to explain to them that those maps are some person's
viewpoint based on information that is orthogonal to the new license
compatibility, and that their work has not been "stolen".  Which only
makes it harder to convince those authors to agree to the new license
(and shouldn't this, and the remapping going on, really be somebody
else's task?).
Does that mean that LWG needs to ask all of those who agreed to CT
1.2.4 to accept a new version of the contract, if it wants to switch
to ODbL? (incidentally tonight I found that the OpenStreetMap website
has not been displaying the full Contributor Terms document to the
people agreeing for the last perhaps three months, due to a bug --
basically since the introduction of version 1.2.4 [3])  How does that
relate to the < 4 months time left to find out what is or isn't new
license compatible?

Cheers

1. 
http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/Blatant-case-of-tagging-for-the-renderer-tt6633546.html
2. http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/aharvey/diary
3. 
https://github.com/balrog-kun/openstreetmap-website/commit/fa7e099d840f1214a4a3339873bc39ed52f0a485

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Re: [OSM-talk] Editing of content that will be deleted on April 1st

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 13 December 2011 23:03, David Earl  wrote:
[...]
> What are the precise, numeric criteria for proceeding? At the moment even by
> a vague definition I don't see how one could describe it as a critical mass.

I'm responding to this old thread because now I think whoever made the
criteria could have answered the question asked here.  But really
there's probably no answer because the date was pulled out of thin
air.  There are old comments in the mailing list archives from LWG
members that when and how to measure if enough data is ready, would be
decided later by the contributors at that time.  I think the reason
this hasn't happened is that the LWG and the board work like
committees (for some time, perhaps not since the beginning).  A
committee can easily allow itself to change its mind or not answer
questions and it has to be noted that this is none of the committee
members' fault.  It's just how committees work.  Their time is too
valuable to be spent answering every single question asked or
considering lesser problems (it really is, since they meet once every
some time), which frees a committee from having to justify many
decisions.  It also has the leisure of having a high authority (it's
assumed to be an expert group even in a do-cracy) but at the same time
not having to stick to everything it says, which is unique.  Now a
license change is generally a terribly complex thing to execute and I
guess there's no other way to do it than through a committee with an
assigned mandate, who won't stop once it gains momentum; so we have to
live with that.

Cheers
--
some fortunes I just found:

The weaker the data available upon which to base one's conclusion,
the greater the precision which should be quoted in order to give
the data authenticity.

Cruickshank's Law of Committees:
If a committee is allowed to discuss a bad idea long enough, it
will inevitably decide to implement the idea simply because so
much work has already been done on it.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Transition to CC-4 instead of destroying data

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 19 December 2011 14:02, Simon Poole  wrote:
> OSM is very different than Wikipedia in many areas, for example
> Wikipedia doesn't really distribute its data for use in other projects
> (commercial or other)  and in so far doesn't have as large responsibility
> towards downstream data users as OSM has.

Wikipedia is much less machine-readable data than OSM, probably less
fit for industrial use and more so for personal use.  And it's
digestible without much processing.  That's the main reason it doesn't
have regular "planet" files rather than licensing or people's
attitude.  OSM *needs* external data users for our data to even be
useful.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] instead of replacing data can I just revert to the last known "clean" version?

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 16 December 2011 12:12, Ed Avis  wrote:
> Frederik Ramm  writes:
>
>>I am experimenting with using the tag "odbl=clean" for this,
>
> I guess "ct=clean" would be better since there may be data which is usable
> under the CTs but is not yet distributable under ODbL+DbCL.

Perhaps both tags can have their uses.  At this point in time
odbl=clean is the one that the License Change implementers will be
interested in.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM render for mobile

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 16 December 2011 15:25, Frans Thamura  wrote:
> hi all
>
> we has successfully deploy the global map in osmosa.net :) 1 week more
> for osm2psql, and 4 days for tile generator
>
> now, we want to make it run on mobile phone and table, a touch oriented
>
> i can see the sliipy map's zoom is bad in mobile devices

I believe there have been improvements in OpenLayers in this area
recently, so try out the latest version and see if you like it.  Other
than OpenLayers, also leaflet-js and khtml.org libraries are well
adapted to mobile / multitouch devices, so try them out too.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] ODBL Status Garmin Maps

[andrzej zaborowski]

The subject should rather say CT-acceptance status Garmin map, as the
map is not based on ODbL compatibility but rather on CT-acceptance.
ODbL compatibility is not implied by CT version 1.2.4 acceptance.  Not
because someone clicked "accept" fraudulently, but because its text
doesn't really require it.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] Transition to CC-4 instead of destroying data

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 15 December 2011 16:42, Ed Avis  wrote:
> Henk Hoff  gmail.com> writes:
>
>>Looking at the current situation, the ODbL is a step forward from the current
>>CC-BY-SA 2.0. When (in due time) CC4 proofs to be a better license then ODbL,
>>we could change to this license.
>
> If the new CC licence will be ready next year, why not keep the existing CC
> licence available as an option until then, in parallel with the ODbL?  Then 
> when
> CC4 is finalized the OSMF can make the decision whether to drop CC altogether.
> But people can still take advantage of the extra permissions given by ODbL, 
> too.

There exist cases where people are *now* using OSM under CC-By-SA,
with full respect of all of our community guidelines, where they will
have to stop using it if OSM becomes ODbL-only.  This is because share
alike licenses are incompatible with each other, even though as some
human-readable summary says the two licenses are similar in spirit.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] Who mapped it first with ref to forth coming deletions - implication

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 14 December 2011 20:14, Maarten Deen  wrote:
> On 14-12-2011 19:32, Richard Weait wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 1:15 PM, john whelan
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> So essentially all data that existed on this date will need to be deleted
>>> since we can't be sure who entered or edited it or if they have agreed to
>>> the new license if the .odbl database is to be "clean".
>>
>>
>> That's quite a conclusion that you are jumping to there, John.  Of
>> responding accounts registered by then, more than 98.5% have accepted
>> CT/ODbL.
>
> Well, since all history of that data before API v0.5 is lost, and the oldest
> history known is of the last person editing it, you don't know who created
> it. Therefore you don't know if this data is created by someone who agrees
> to the CT and/or the license move.
>
> Isn't the conclusion then that that data should be deleted?

The conclusion should probably be that it needs to be treated as if v1
was not ODbL compatible.  With a clever enough algorithm this may not
always be the same thing.

However http://planet.osm.org/history/ contains daily diffs starting
from 2004-07-01.  But, it looks like only the last edit of each day is
kept which means that there may be edits by other users in between
these edits (?).

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Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] License Change View on OSM Inspector

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 13 December 2011 22:46, Peter Wendorff  wrote:
> Am 13.12.2011 20:59, schrieb Nathan Edgars II:
>> There is no difference in terms of acceptability under the ODBL+CT. Such
>> copying is either OK or not.
>
> Even in law exists the distinction between crimes done willingly and those
> done unwillingly or without knowledge. You don't get necessarily out of the
> case without any harm if you didn't know or didn't want it, but often you
> have to do/pay/be imprisoned less than if you would have done that
> willingly.

In this case this is not a crime and not a violation of Contributor
Terms, the only reason a mapper may suspect it to be wrong is if they
know that it is going to lead to the OSMF later violating the
copyright of the original author by not applying sufficient criteria
for detecting that a given element's licensing is not compatible with
ODbL and publishing it under ODbL.  I'd say that's very far fetched
and (hopefully) an underestimate of the LWG's brain power.

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Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] License Change View on OSM Inspector

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 13 December 2011 22:03, Graham Jones  wrote:
> I agree, it sounds mad, and I find it hard to believe that 'we' would do
> this.   Surely we need to apply a bit of pragmatism to  this and think about
> 'reasonableness'?
>
> I can see that it is reasonable to delete the contributions from someone who
> has explicitly said that they do not agree to the new terms - that is a
> shame, but it is their choice.
>
> From the discussion on this list (and I have not looked into it properly - I
> gave up on thinking about licences when the 'debate' all got out of hand
> earlier in the year), it sounds as though if someone who has neither
> accepted nor declined the terms has touched an object, that object will be
> deleted - is this really the intention of those looking after this licence
> change?
>
> I see there are three potential reasons for someone neither accepting nor
> declining the terms:
>
> They really do not agree with them, but for some reason that I can not think
> of they decide not to click the 'decline' button - These are an awkward
> case, but it is up to them to make their intentions clear.
> They left the project having made their contribution and are now not
> contactable (changed email address etc.), or so un-interested that they do
> not respond.
> They could be really keen OSM contributors who have since died, so are not
> answering their emails.
>
> In my opinion, it would be reasonable to assume that the last two have the
> best interests of the project at heart and do not want to have their
> contributions deleted, so they should be retained.  If at some point they
> contact us to say that they object to their contributions being in the
> database, then yes, delete them, but leave them there until they do.

What's in the best interest of the project is very discussable.  My
personal opinion is that the change to the licensing model where a
single body is the licensor instead of every contributor, is not in
the project's interest and anything that helps this change isn't
either.

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Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] License Change View on OSM Inspector

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 13 December 2011 22:30, Nathan Edgars II  wrote:
> On 12/13/2011 4:25 PM, john whelan wrote:
>>
>> The intentions don't matter here, its to be able to defend the new
>> licensing / copyright in court you need to show all the content has come
>> from people who have accepted the new license.
>
>
> Which is impossible because of the common practice of copying tags from a
> node to a building polygon.

It is possible but not in an automated manner.  With some very clever
automated heuristics it might be close to correct.  But certainly not
only by looking at the history of each object individually.  This is
one reason the current ODbL-status tools are of little value.

The second reason I see is that they look at CT-acceptance, which as
it stands is orthogonal to ODbL-compatibility.  Both of these things
are present in OSM now:
* data incompatible with ODbL but compatible with the current
licensing terms, allowed to be contributed under CT and
* data which available under ODbL (such as my contributions)
contributed by mappers who decline the current version of CT.

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Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] License Change View on OSM Inspector

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 13 December 2011 11:52, Richard Fairhurst  wrote:
> "Remapping means 'replacing with new content'. It does not mean simply
> copying the old content - that might infringe the original mapper's rights."

Is that statement even correct?  If editing old content after May 12
doesn't infringe rights of the authors of previous versions then
surely copying and pasting old content does not infringe either, or
this functionality should not be in the editors.

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Copyright status of OSM map data - publishable memo for USA

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 8 December 2011 15:30, 80n <80n...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 1:20 PM, Ed Avis  wrote:
> * If the map is considered to be a compilation then all contributors, as
> joint authors, have joint copyright ownership.
>
> The hanging question in my mind is, if we assume, for the moment, that every
> contributor has joint copyright ownership, what rights would they actually
> have?  Do they have full and unrestricted copyright in the whole
> compilation?  Are they bound, or limited, by any of the terms or conditions
> that they agreed to when signing up?  Are they in any way limited by the
> CC-BY-SA license grant?  Would the Contributor Terms deny them any of their
> joint ownership rights?

OSM, Wikipedia and other projects having joint ownership by its
contributors could have quite important consequences, personally I
think it's very unlikely that this is right.  The cost to acquire
joint authorship would be low and the rights acquired very broad.  In
my view it would effectively be a loophole in copyright which would
allow any other compatibly (e.g. share-alike) licensed work to be
imported into the database and then relicensed under any other terms.
Anyone could become a joint copyright owner in any (freely licensed)
work they wish.

I remember Anthony on the osm-fork list has previously explained why
OSM is not a joint copyright work and what would be required for it to
be one, have the lawyers considered that reasoning?

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Re: [OSM-talk] Friends

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 2 December 2011 23:03, Toby Murray  wrote:
> One thing I have thought might not be too hard to code up and provide
> some use would be to have a "Recent edits by my friends" page that
> just accumulates recent edits by your friends onto one page and
> displays it with bboxes like the single user edit history page. Right
> now you can only see the changeset comments from the last edit your
> friends have made. To see more is at least 2 clicks for each friend.

It would be great too if the changeset comments were displayed in some
place in the editors, e.g. the bottom of the MOTD page in JOSM or
somewhere else.  Either your own only, or even better your friends'
and nearby mappers' changes too.  Currently you only ever see them if
you browse edits on the web and this isn't enough motivation for many
people to comment changes.

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Refusing CT but declaring contributions as PD

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 24 August 2011 17:56, Simon Poole  wrote:
>
> But probably the buck would stop with the OSMF. Distributing data just
> because somebody on the web said it was PD has a high likelihood of being
> considered negligent.

I don't really see the issue.  Almost everything OSMF uses or Linux or
Wikipedia use is because someone on the web said it had a given
license or terms of use.  Saying that is enough to create some sort of
contract.

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Refusing CT but declaring contributions as PD

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 24 August 2011 16:35, Richard Weait  wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 9:52 AM, Richard Fairhurst  
> wrote:
>> I'm a little puzzled by this. "Asserting that one's contributions are in
>> the public domain" is saying, in the words of the disclaimer used on
>> Wikipedia and on the OSM wiki, "I grant anyone the right to use my
>> contributions for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such
>> conditions are required by law".
>>
>> Therefore I don't see any reason why the data cannot be included in OSM.
>> The contributor has given a grant of all rights - not just copyright, but
>> any database right or indeed other right that might exist. There is no
>> difference between (say) TimSC's PD data and the TIGER PD data, but we're
>> not requiring the US Census Bureau to sign the terms.[1]
>>
>> The minute says "Their 'PD' position contradicts the explicit decline",
>> which seems to me to be true legally but not "politically". There are
>> people who do not wish to enter into a formal agreement with OSMF, and
>> though I think they're mistaken, they doubtless have their own reasons.
>
> When considering usernames that have 1) made a PD assertion and 2)
> explicitly declined CT/ODbL, there is a conflict in their expressed
> intent.

I guess what RichardF is saying is when you sign something it's not
only expressing intent but also an acceptance of the mechanism, the
way it is implemented, sort of.  So there certainly needs not be any
contradiction.

>  The explicit accept / decline mechanism of the CT/ODbL is the
> mechanism provided and used by the vast majority of the OSM community.
>
> To accept their ad-hoc PD declaration may require a substantial
> investment of resources to 1) determine if their jurisdiction permits
> such a PD declaration,

The declaration is only valid "to the extent permitted by law" (as
Frederik said), but other than that it should be valid everywhere.
I'm not even sure if the jurisdiction of the mapper is important
rather than where the data is published.

> 2) decide if that PD declaration is likely to
> over-ride their explicit decline via the community-accepted mechanism.
>
>>
>> What am I missing? What exactly is meant by "the collective data in the
>> OSM database"?
>
> OSMF have permission to publish data as CC-By-SA, and in future from
> most contributors as ODbL.  OSMF have no permission to publish data as
> PD at this time.  TIGER PD data came from PD TIGER data sources.  If
> the usernames in question have a PD source for the data that they
> assert is PD, we might use that as a source for OSM.  If that data is
> only in OSM, it isn't PD; it is CC-By-SA.  It can be promoted to ODbL
> by way of accepting CT/ODbL.

This is a different topic but last I heard the CT don't assure
everything you upload is ODbL compatible, but rather than "your
contribution" is compatible with all the licenses that may be chosen
by OSMF -- and that everything you uploaded is as far as you know
compatible with the current license, i.e. CC-By-SA.

And surely the PD checkbox also only regards "your contribution", but
there's no statement regarding the sources you may have used.

(A side note is that you saying this makes it clearer that the CT is
so complex/fuzzy that even the authors hardly understand everything
that the text really implies)

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Re: [OSM-talk] Id stability

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 1 August 2011 09:52, Maarten Deen  wrote:
> On Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:21:44 +0200, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
>> (Two or three people have also started tagging OSM objects with UUID
>> tags but I don't think that that's anything more than database bloat.
>> I think that about 99.9% of UUID tags in the database come from a
>> building import where somebody automatically assigned an UUID to every
>> last garden shed. Not useful.)
>
> Even though, it might be the best solution. The other solution would be that
> everybody who wants to use the object for their purpose adds their own
> home-made tag to it. And that certainly would be a database bloat.

Just throwing some ideas here, but one might consider using the OSM ID
+ version as the unique id.  If the object is later changed in OSM,
deleted and recreated, or whatever, it can be tagged with
object_id=5764736:v1 to mean that it is still the same object as had
been referenced by 5764736:v1 from elsewhere.

Or create an OSM relation containing just the thing you want to link
to and reference the relation's Id the editors already support
warning when somethign bad happens to a relation member.  Relations
are unlikely to be reused for a compeltely new purpose and they can be
undeleted and modified to match changes in reality.  Using relations
also allows an osm entity to be part of multiple "real world" objects,
or multiple osm entities to form one "real world" object, both of
which may be desired.

>
> Of course you would add a UUID tag only to objects that are actualy
> referenced. And then you would need some way to enforce uniqueness.

Because of the above I'm not sure if you want to enforce uniqueness,
you might even want >1 UUIDs per osm entity.
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Re: [OSM-talk] shortened names

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 27 July 2011 12:01, Richard Fairhurst  wrote:
> Increasingly you can treat "St" as a valid spelling of the word "saint",
> rather than merely an abbreviation. No (educated) native English speaker
> would write a placename with 'Saint', and every native English speaker would
> pronunce St in that context as 'saint'.

Still only if provided with enough context to correctly guess which of
the words spelt St it is.  This isn't the most complicated case, you
only need to process about one word ahead as context (or in this case
perhaps just knowing it's at the start of the name), but for many
tasks it would be great to eliminate the guessing.

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Re: [OSM-talk] shortened names

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 27 July 2011 04:04, Stephen Hope  wrote:
> On 27 July 2011 10:40, Ed Loach  wrote:
>> Yes, it is called Saint Albans, written St Albans, except where some
>> websites seem to have expanded it.
>>
>> e.g.
>> http://www.meteoprog.co.uk/en/weather/SaintAlbans/
>> http://www.gomapper.com/travel/map-of/saint-albans.html
>> etc...
>> http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=%22saint+albans%22
>>
>> I personally would be tempted to store the name tag in expanded form
>> so it is clear what the St abbreviation applies to (I've seen things
>> like S St N on Google where they've abbreviated South Street North,
>> for example, which just looks silly). This seems to agree with
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:name#Notes
>>
>
> Um - no.  If a place wants to be written "St Albans", then that's the
> name. Just because you pronounce it "Saint Albans" makes no
> difference.

I'd say the opposite is true.  If it's pronounced "Saint Albans" then
that is the name.  The local administration may want to spell it
however they like and make one way or the other official, but we don't
care, in the end it's always a product of how people are and have been
calling the place.  Place names have often been abbreviated in writing
because there was never any need for consistency across countries and
continents, much less for machine-readability.  In OSM there is this
need.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Orphaned Relations

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 17 July 2011 23:55, Sarah Hoffmann  wrote:
> I recently stumbled upon some empty route relations, so I had a
> closer look at the OSM planet and found that there are about
> 10.000 orphaned relations in the database and the number is growing.
>
> With orphaned I mean relations that have no members and are not
> member of any other relation. Some are completely empty but most
> still have some tags. I have created a list of the relations sorted
> by last editing user here:
...
>
> Question remains what to do with the existing orphaned relations.
> Is there any legimate use for them or would it be save to simply
> delete them all?

So I had stumbled on the same fact about a year ago and after some
discussion on this list I deleted about 8000 empty/orphaned relations.
 It seems all except a handful of those 8000 relations had indeed been
left in the not-deleted state by mistake.  There were a couple (<5)
that had still been referenced from the wiki, rather than from inside
the database through other relations.  I got a couple of e-mails
months later asking about those relations and undeleted them, it would
probably be a good idea to check for references in the wiki beforehand
this time.  I don't think it makes sense to create such empty
relations before any members are added to them because it's quite
likely someone else is going to create a duplicate, but I don't have a
strong opinion and being in the losing position as an author of an
automated edit I didn't want to argue with the creators of these
relations.

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Re: [OSM-talk] shortened names

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 7 July 2011 19:50, John Smith  wrote:
> On 7 July 2011 23:33, andrzej zaborowski  wrote:
>>> In some cases, the official name is with the abbreviation, eg St.
>>> George Bank in Australia and there is a town named St. George.
>>
>> Still you say Saint George, not S.T. George.
>
> Well you can ring up the bank/local government and tell them they're
> doing things wrong :)

They're not, they're using a shorthand in writing because it's.. shorter. :)

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Re: [OSM-talk] shortened names

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 7 July 2011 11:29, John Smith  wrote:
> On 7 July 2011 19:23, Pieren  wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 7:45 AM, Jochen Topf  wrote:
>>>
>>> Yes, thats the consensus and has been for a long time. Some mappers always
>>> disagree, just ignore them. :-)
>>>
>>
>> +1
>>
>> And in software, it is always easier to shorten a word than expanding an
>> abbreviation. 'st' is for 'Saint' or for 'Street' ?
>
> In some cases, the official name is with the abbreviation, eg St.
> George Bank in Australia and there is a town named St. George.

Still you say Saint George, not S.T. George.

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Re: [OSM-talk] transparent road layer

[andrzej zaborowski]

Thanks for the summary.

On 16 June 2011 16:32, Rob Truxler  wrote:
> geoiq has a nice road layer that is very simple, no icons, just white roads 
> with legible labels. Depending on your application, the simplicity of the 
> acetate road layer can be appealing:
> http://a3.acetate.geoiq.com/tiles/acetate-roads/z/x/y.png
>  (45 KB)

This looks quite nice but has problems with text encoding in names
(non ascii characters display as boxes, 1 box per UTF8 byte) and data
is outdated.  I'd also make the highways more transparent and only
leave the labels fully opaque.

> With the help of Ant and Deborah from MapQuest I was able to get the URL of 
> mapquest's transparent road layer that's part of their hybrid layer:
> http://vtiles01.mqcdn.com/tiles/1.0.0/vy/hyb/z/x/y.(gif|png)
>  (25 KB)
> Note: looking at just a couple of these tiles, I'd recommend using the gif 
> format since the tiles are about half the file size and the PNG doesn't 
> appear to have any alpha anti-aliasing

This in turn seems to use data from a different source than OSM.

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk-au] Statement from nearmap.com regarding submission of derived works from PhotoMaps to OpenStreetMap

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,
(this is offtopic, I know)

On 17 June 2011 16:06, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
> On 06/17/11 11:18, John Smith wrote:
>>>
>>> Only if the amount of data traced is not substantial.
>>
>> CC-by-SA makes no such distinction, it's either cc-by-sa or it's not
>> cc-by-sa, so which license can tiles be put under?
>
> Sorry, I thought you had asked about tracing from tiles.
>
> Tiles can be put under CC-BY-SA with no problem; in fact the main OSM
> tileserver is likely to do that.

I have two doubts here.  I understand the produced work can be put
under a By-SA license but database rights may still apply.  But:

1. IIRC the newer versions of CC-By-SA include statements to ensure
that the content is not protected by database rights, patents or DRM,
which would prevent their uses.  Does that mean that only the older
licenses can be used for produced works?

Looking at GPLv3 and other licenses it is becoming more common for
licenses to assure that the content is not restricted by those
additional rights, and it makes sense because in some way those
additional rights make the works not "free".

2. What happens if a person in country A with database rights
publishes a tileset and licenses it under CC-By-SA to a person in
country B without database rights?  The second person is then as far
as I can see not bound by database rights or a contract.  Is that
incorrect?

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] data derived from UK Ordnace Survey

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 16 June 2011 14:47, Robert Whittaker (OSM)
 wrote:
> On 16 June 2011 09:55, Richard Fairhurst  wrote:
>> Robert Whittaker wrote:
>>> A major purpose of the CTs is to ensure that all the data
>>> remaining in OSM is suitable for re-licensing under any "Free
>>> and Open" license without the need for further checks.
>>
>> No, that hasn't been the case since Contributor Terms 1.2 were proposed in
>> November 2010 and subsequently adopted.
>>
>> 1.2.x say: "If you contribute Contents, You are indicating that, as far as
>> You know, You have the right to authorize OSMF to use and distribute those
>> Contents under our _current_ licence terms" (my emphasis).
>
> I'm sorry, but I believe that you're mistaken here.
>
> Your interpretation of what you've quoted from clause 1(a) is correct,
> but there are additional requirements elsewhere in the CTs which go
> beyond this. In particular Clause 2 requires an extensive rights grant
> to OSMF, which would, in particular, give them the right (without any
> further checking of the source's requirements) to re-license your
> contributions under any "free and open" license. If you do not have
> the right to give this right to OSMF for all the contents you have
> contributed, then you are not able comply with the CTs, and therefore
> should not sign them. Nothing in clause 2 says that weaker clause 1
> must over-ride it (note that clause 2 specifically mentions that it is
> "Subject to Section 3 and 4 below" but contains no mention of section
> 1. So by default you have to comply with both clauses 1 and 2
> separately.)
>
> If OSMF / LWG intended to only require contributed data complied with
> the current license, then I believe they have made a mistake in the
> wording of clause 2. However I don't think they made a mistake, as
> there was an amendment to clause 2 in a previous draft of the CTs,
> which would have allowed contents based on third-party sources to be
> submitted without violating clause 2, but this was reverted in a later
> draft.
>
> Maybe LWG would care to comment here on what they intended, and what
> they believe the effect of the current CTs actually is.

I believe the LWG was planning to go the way Richard is describing
(and Richard even sent an email to the LWG in support of that) but
then, a short time before updating the Contributor Terms to the
current version (1.2.4?) they changed their mind and decided checking
license compatiblity on the OSMF side, while good for the users would
be too much burden for OSM.  So they went back to a mechanism that
ensures that the OSMF will be able to update to any contributors
approved free and open license.  I think the LWG stated something like
this in the minutes or even on the list.

If not then by my reading a lot of the heated discussion of the last
two months on these lists has been moot. (ha ha!)

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Re: [OSM-talk] transparent road layer

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 13 June 2011 19:19, Rob Truxler  wrote:
> Hi Everyone
> Does anyone know a map tile web service that produces transparent tiles with
> just roads and their labels and icons on them?  I'm hoping to use this layer
> with a background tileset that I already have. I'm open to using anything
> that is not in breach of a terms of service -- a custom mapnik server, a
> yahoo service, bing service, mapquest service, anything that has this
> feature. Does anyone know one? If not, is it feasible to set up a custom
> mapnik server that does this?

Mapsurfer.net had a really nice roads + names overlay, but it's down
for a couple of weeks now, I'd like to know if it's going to be back
myself.  It wasn't mapnik based, it was some custom thing.  It worked
great for aerial imagery.

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] Navigon to Sell OpenStreetMap POIs Packages for PNDs

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 14 June 2011 15:51, Jonas Krückel  wrote:
> Am 14.06.2011 um 15:43 schrieb andrzej zaborowski:
> On 14 June 2011 15:29, Jonas Krückel  wrote:
>> Once we move on to ODbL however, this will change and we will get
>> the much more interesting 'raw' data.
>
> Which we can't re-use in OSM however.
>
> Maybe you should explain why not, because from my understanding this data
> would be in an OSM compatible license because of the share-a-like aspect of
> ODbL [1].

That means we can mix it with OSM, but not contribute it back to OSM
because the new contributor terms don't allow using ODbL licensed
data.

>
> Someone on IRC mentioned that the situation would be clearer under
> ODbL, too, but I think this is a false positive.  Additionally with
> ODbL Navigon may take the position that they made a produced work.
>
> Yes, their POI packages maybe produced work and could be proprietary, but
> they would still have to release the processed OSM data from in between,
> which as I stated above might be more interesting to us.
> All that is only on how I understand the license and I'm not an expert on
> this.

I'm not an expert either, perhaps you're right they'd have to release
the processed data.

> Also, I think it would be appropriate to continue this discussion on
> legal-talk.

Ok.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Navigon to Sell OpenStreetMap POIs Packages for PNDs

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 14 June 2011 15:29, Jonas Krückel  wrote:
>
> Am 14.06.2011 um 14:29 schrieb davespod:
>
> http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/Navigon-Add-22-Million-POIs-To-SatNav-Devices--1060.php
>
> An interesting development. If I understand things correctly (and assuming
> CC-by-SA holds water for data), they can charge for these derived data sets,
> but they would still have to be CC-by-SA, and so anyone who bought one could
> then redistribute without charge. Does that sound right?
>
> A note on this one for everyone not reading talk-de [1]:
> Ulf Möller, who has been a member of the OSMF Board and is part of the LWG,
> had been given a test device by Navigon in order to check for correct
> attribution.
> He was also asked by Navigon to distribute a text file [2] to the community
> which contains some basic information about how Navigon processes the data,
> links to download the packages for free (CC-BY-SA compliance AFAIK) and also
> instructions on how to install these files on a device.
>
> P.S. If they have de-duplicated these, as they claim, perhaps it is worth
> getting our hands on as a resource for cleaning up the database...
>
>
> Well, it would be nice and we could certainly ask for it, but with CC-BY-SA
> only the end product falls under the license and not the processed data in
> between.

Are you sure?  If we manage to extract the processed data, it'll be
derived from either the end product or OSM or both, so it needs to be
CC-By-SA too and there's no way around it.

> Once we move on to ODbL however, this will change and we will get
> the much more interesting 'raw' data.

Which we can't re-use in OSM however.

Someone on IRC mentioned that the situation would be clearer under
ODbL, too, but I think this is a false positive.  Additionally with
ODbL Navigon may take the position that they made a produced work.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Airspace & Co.

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 7 June 2011 13:58, Steve Bennett  wrote:
> The best long term solution to this, and other problems, would be to
> have better facilities for creating and integrating overlays. Just
> like Wikipedia solved some of its scoping problems by telling people
> to stick it all on Wikia, it would be easier if we had another
> solution: "don't put airspaces in OSM, put it in 
> and then overlay it with ".

Or maybe "put it in OSM airspace db" or "historic db".  I can imagine
a set of OSM api servers for different purposes all under the name of
OSM.  You could then have the editor's Download dialog have a dropdown
list right there instead of hidden inside the Preferences dialog, with
an (editable) list like the imagery sources list.

Would it be confusing?  I don't think so, while it could make OSM
reacher and useful in more specific mapping projects.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Three-dimensional aerial imagery

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 14 May 2011 18:16, Ed Avis  wrote:
> I saw this news story about how three-dimensional aerial photos, viewed with
> special glasses, make it easier to pick out structures on the ground.
>
> 
>
> I wonder if any such 3-d imagery is available today?  It would seem to involve
> having two cameras a set distance apart.  If OSM ever charters a plane again, 
> as
> was done for Stratford-upon-Avon, England, a few years back, it might be worth
> taking two cameras instead of one.

The techniques and the software used in aerial imagery normally
struggle to reduce the perspective effect to the minimum, so that the
view is almost isometric.  One of the advantages of that is that you
can pan around the single image and have the illusion of flying over
the terrain.  With the perspective effect you couldn't do that, you
would just have 3D views from a few discrete points like in Google
StreetView.  You also wouldn't be able to rotate the imagery like you
can in Nearmap or Bing, because your eyes won't rotate.

If you want that, though, I don't think you need to resurvey
Stratford-upon-Avon with two cameras.  With the camera shooting
continuously you can just pick pairs of consecutive images that are
some known distance apart and you get the same effect.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 20 April 2011 07:13, Russ Nelson  wrote:
> Mike  Dupont writes:
>  > how can you take a cc-by-sa document edit it and publish it under pd?
>  > can I just make derived works in any license i want?
>
> Well, that's part of the problem here. How do we determine what is
> someone's work, and what is a derived work?  If I take a way that
> someone has entered (poorly), and I move each and every node, and fix
> the speling on the name of the way, whose creative work is it?  (one
> could easily argue that the other person was the one being "creative"
> whereas my work is merely a fact about the world, but I'm not going to
> make that argument here).

I don't see this as a real problem.  I'm sure you'd agree that if all
of the authors accept a new license then the whole element is safe to
put under the new license.  So what you're really saying by submitting
edits under the new CTs is that you authorise whoever to use your
modification under the given license, not the osm entity.  You
authrise osmf to publish the data under the new license provided that
other authors do the same.

(this is not written in the CTs but I think Francis Davey implied that
this is how it could be understood even in a legal case)

>
> We don't really know the answer to that, which makes this whole
> "license changing screw the community, we know better" exercize a piss
> in a pot.

Agreed.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 17 April 2011 01:53, David Murn  wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-04-16 at 23:36 +0100, 80n wrote:
>> Do you think that Google haven't considered the possibilty of
>> incorporating OSM data into their MapMaker database?  Why do you think
>> they haven't?  Perhaps our data is not good enough for them?  Or
>> perhaps, legally, they don't think they have the right?
>
> I think the 'not good' enough argument pretty much hits the nail on the
> head.  As great as our data may be, any commercial entity probably has
> access to similar data, which they can probably get with some sort of
> quality assurance guarantee.  If google wants maps of a city/town/state,
> they just goto the government of the area and get it.  They know its
> complete, they know its accurate, they know if theres a problem with the
> data that theres only one source to contact.

That's not true everywhere, for example all of the places where google
enabled Map Maker.  It also must have not been true in Columbia where
the google map data supplier used OSM and Google had no concerns with
completness or quality guarantees.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 17 April 2011 01:22, Tobias Knerr  wrote:
> Personally, I don't want to sue anyone. However, I want to unambiguously
> have the right to publish an OSM based map that doesn't provide
> attribution for every single mapper. I also consider improved
> compatibility with other licenses for produced works a welcome benefit.
> And I'm almost certain that the legal and social environment in which we
> operate will change during the next decades, so it would be nice to be
> able to react to them by modifying the terms under which we publish our
> maps; preferably without losing orders of magnitudes more data than we
> might now. Some also think that the shift of share-alike from works onto
> data makes sense, and I think that they have good arguments for that
> position.

It probably makes sense (although both things may be desired
sometimes).  But while the new license might allow new users to take
advantage of OSM it'll also take it away from some existing users
because ODbL is not compatible with CC-By-SA in either direction.  I
know a relatively big project that's currently using OSM data under
CC-By-SA and may be in a nasty surprise when they find OSM is no
longer suitable.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 16 April 2011 23:37, Ed Avis  wrote:
> Frederik Ramm  remote.org> writes:
>
>>I would like a big player with a big legal department - say, for
>>example, Navteq - grabbing our data for a reasonably well mapped place,
>>perhaps a city only, incorporating it into their data set in way that it
>>either obvious (i.e. we can easily prove that they did it), or maybe
>>they even admit it. Then I would like someone who has contributed data
>>in that area to sue them, and I would like the lawsuit to have an
>>outcome that hurts the big player
>
> Hmm... so the fact that such grabbing of data has never occurred does not 
> count
> as evidence for you.  This is problematic, since in general things only go to
> court if the legal status is questionable.  If it's reasonably certain, the 
> side
> that's in the wrong will back down long before then.  For example, I don't 
> think
> the GNU GPL has ever gone to court.

Yes it has.  Harald Welte's gpl-violations.org has hundreds of cases
resolved successfully either in court or outside, including some very
big software and hardware companies.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 16 April 2011 10:29, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
> On 04/16/2011 02:05 AM, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
>> At this point it's only known that there's an unspecified non-zero
>> part of the community which wants OSM to switch license.  Not everyone
>> needs to be true to that part of the community just like not everyone
>> needs to be true to the part that wants OSM data in Public Domain or
>> the part that drinks coffee with milk etc.
>
> Let us try and separate the issue of license change from the issue of the CT
> for a moment. Let us assume that there was no immediate license change
> planned; that OSMF intended to continue using CC-BY-SA for now; and that
> they only sought CT agreement from mappers, in order to make a potential
> future license change easier.
>
> The CT contain this clause whereby it becomes impossible to do what Dermot
> writes above - if 2/3 of mappers agree to use another free and open license,
> then that is the new license and everyone's data is changed to that new
> license.
>
> I think that *that* is the major change here,

Yes.

> and I have outlined in the
> past that I believe that you cannot be a part of a crowdsourced mapping
> effort if you consider your contribution to be only "rented out" to the
> project. If you want to participate in OSM, where all the time others will
> build upon your work, then you cannot sensibly say "but if you decide to
> change your license later I might choose to take away my contribution". If
> you contribute to OSM, you pour a glass of water into an ocean. You cannot
> wrap that in plastic and label it "yours". I made a comparison with
> voluntary work in real-life communities; if you have spent a lot of time and
> love helping to build a nice playground for the village school but later the
> whole school decides to adopt some pedadogic direction of which you don't
> approve and you put your kid elsewhere, you cannot tear town the playground.
> It wouldn't be right (and it would be very unlikely to make you happy).
>
> Now if someone says "I'm willing to sign the CT on the condition that before
> OSMF switches to ODbL, they execute the exact license change procedure
> outlined in the CT, with asking 2/3 of active mappers etc.", then this is
> something I can understand and respect.
>
> I do however have the impression that there are some people for whom calling
> for a public vote is just another means to delay and hopefully derail the
> process, and secretly they never intended to continue supporting the project
> after a license change anyway.

That's possible but unlikely.  There are some reasons why the vote
would have been rather useless (which have been outlined in this
thread) but they're not really obvious and that's why perhaps it's
hard to realise.

>
> I have a suggestion, one which we could implement in true crowdsourced
> spirit and without any OSMF involvement. We simply draw up a document that
> is basically a modified version of the current contributor terms, which says
> "I am willing to make the following contract with OSMF on the additional
> condition of OSMF holding the 2/3 vote as described below before they change
> from ODbL to CC-BY-SA". We then devise some sort of sufficiently legally
> binding way for people to "sign" this document. Everyone who thinks that the
> CT are ok in principle but who would like a proper vote first, signs this
> document instead of the "real" CT.

But now you're talking about the license switch from CC-By-SA to ODbL
only and taking for granted that the switch from "linux model" to "FSF
model" is obviously good for the project.  Here are some reasons why
people might oppose that switch in the first place, and not because
they find it fun to troll mailing lists, but because they want the
project to succeed.  I'm personally quite ambivalent of ODbL and
CC-By-SA because the issues that decide which license would be better
for us, are so complex.

* The cost of switching is too high -- the community split, the
banning of a part of current mappers from mapping, the loss of data
that is already in our database.  It's simply quite late for the
switch with the little benefit that it brings.

* Under the new CTs (some versions of the document anyway... still
seems to be in flux), you may not be able to use (in OSM) data that
has been built on top of our OSM data by others.  For some of us this
means a failure of the share alike clause.  It's probably similar in
case of the FSF-hosted projects and mozilla/apache projects, but for
the majority of projects I know as free/open it would mean a failure.

* Other potential or real issues in the CTs, which is a contract
written b

Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 16 April 2011 01:29, Dermot McNally  wrote:
> This licence change now gives every mapper the means of undermining
> the map through withholding of their own data, once freely given and
> now very likely a foundation of data created by other mappers, also in
> good faith. I understand that many mappers feel they _can't_ relicense
> some or all of their work, and that's a really tough situation. But
> mappers who just plain _won't_ agree to leave their data in, even
> though there is no legal obstacle to it, should strongly consider
> whether they are being true to the community they claim to be a part
> of.

At this point it's only known that there's an unspecified non-zero
part of the community which wants OSM to switch license.  Not everyone
needs to be true to that part of the community just like not everyone
needs to be true to the part that wants OSM data in Public Domain or
the part that drinks coffee with milk etc.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 begins Sunday

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 14 April 2011 21:06, David Groom  wrote:
> - Original Message - From: "andrzej zaborowski" 
>> Under the Contributor Terms 1.2.4 I believe it will be the
>> OpenStreetMap Foundation's responsibility to remove such data before
>> switching the license, you will not be liable.  Until then the data
>> will only be distributed under CC-By-SA and you can accept these new
>> Contributor Terms by which you would be granting OSMF only the rights
>> which you are able to grant.
>>
>> I'm not sure if my interpretation is correct and if it's not then I
>> would like to know the correct interpretation to be able to give an
>> answer to people asking about this in non-English forums.
>
> see this thread (in particular Fracis Davey's comments) on the legal talk
> mailing list
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2011-April/005915.html

So my understanding now, from Francis' comment, is that CC-By-SA and
CC-By are not compatible (you can't accept the CTs if you've
contributed data obtained under those licenses, without infringing
those licenses?), but ODbL for example might be compatible with CT
although it's not compaitble with the current OSM's license.  But it
might be in the future.

Is that correct?  Is that also the intent of the CTs 1.2.4?  I think
it would be good to have a "human readable" form of this document
written by its authors.

I haven't read the CC-By-SA license "code" in this context but I'm
reading in Francis' response that there's something in it that makes
it not compatible.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 begins Sunday

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 14 April 2011 18:26, john whelan  wrote:
> Unfortunately I some of my edits used some sources that looked fine under
> the for CC-by-SA terms but on closer inspection of the ODBL terms, which was
> done after I blindly followed the advice of another contributor, I am not at
> all comfortable that the work would stand up legally for CC-by-ODBL terms.
> I can give a date before which I was not so careful and would very much
> prefer any edits done before this time to be deleted or are you saying I'm
> now legally liable for the content of OSM even though I am aware some data
> does not meet the ODBL terms and I have no way out of this?

Under the Contributor Terms 1.2.4 I believe it will be the
OpenStreetMap Foundation's responsibility to remove such data before
switching the license, you will not be liable.  Until then the data
will only be distributed under CC-By-SA and you can accept these new
Contributor Terms by which you would be granting OSMF only the rights
which you are able to grant.

I'm not sure if my interpretation is correct and if it's not then I
would like to know the correct interpretation to be able to give an
answer to people asking about this in non-English forums.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 14 April 2011 19:50, Dermot McNally  wrote:
> But your suggested course of action has me confused - you are happy to
> make contributions under the new CT and intend to do so, but yet you
> wish to vote against the change. Your choice, I supposed.

I see it logical.  Wanting to contribute to the currently biggest,
most fun free map, with most impact on the industry and a name you got
used to, you soon will have no choice other than to do so under then
new CT because that free map is ruled by people in favor of it.  Yet
the accept/decline buttons are your first chance to vote or express
what you think about the switch if you want to have some say in this
(quite important for the project) decision.  So use this chance, vote
with your data as someone said at the beginning of the process.  This
is also the only way left to find out what the mappers think.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 13 April 2011 00:31, David Murn  wrote:
> If the CTs to be presented to the community are finally agreed upon,
> almost 12 months after the first people were asked to accept it, should
> those users who have previously accepted the licence, be contacted and
> be told that the final terms have been released, and they have the
> chance to read the latest revision and change their vote accordingly.
> Im not sure how legally binding it may be in some parts of the world,
> but Im fairly sure that most places in the world wont allow you to ask
> people to sign a contract then change the terms of that contract 100
> times without letting the other party to the contract choose to opt out.

The CT update just means that the contracts OSMF has with different
users may be different.  It doesn't mean that the OSMF has changed the
terms of an existing contract with any user, which they have no way to
do anyway.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Okay, this is just cool (Lockport, NY)

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 5 April 2011 22:53, Russ Nelson  wrote:
> Richard Weait writes:
>  > On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 8:23 AM, Martijn van Exel  wrote:
>  >
>  > > Out of curiosity: is it considered acceptable to use Google StreetView to
>  > > assist in armchair mapping?
>  >
>  > No.
>
> According to Ed Parsons, it is. As a primary source for all of
> something? No. But as an "assist" as Martijn suggests? Absolutely.

To me Ed Parsons' response doesn't tell us anything we didn't already
know.  It's still kind of a grey area because you can interpret "bulk"
in so many ways -- it's very similar to the signifant and
insignificant extract in the ODbL, it's very difficult to be sure of
anything.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Okay, this is just cool (Lockport, NY)

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 3 April 2011 09:29, Ed Avis  wrote:
> Could you forward Google's reply to this list?

I probably can since this is an inquiry about Google stuff. (I followed up)

On Friday April 01, 2011 2:21 PM, Ed Parsons  wrote:
> Hi Andrzej
>
> What do you want to do?  the relevant clause in the terms of service is..
>
> 2(e) use the Products in a manner that gives you or any other person access 
> to mass downloads or bulk feeds of any Content, including but not limited to 
> numerical latitude or longitude coordinates, imagery, and visible map data;
>
> so checking the odd street names is OK.. but every street name I would 
> suggest would represent a bulk feed.
>
> Surely OSM is complete and up to date in those areas where street view is 
> available ?
>
> On 31 March 2011 21:25, Andrzej Zaborowski 
> mailto:andrew.zaborow...@intel.com>> wrote:
> Hello Ed,
>
> I'm writing to you because you've been responsive the last time I had
> a question about Google Maps services, thanks.
>
> There's some demand for a source of information like Google Street
> View, for use as a mapping aid for us, OpenStreetMappers.  Do you
> think there's any chance of that happening?  As you know we take
> Terms of Use seriously, so we'd need a statement from someone
> like you that it's Ok for us to use Google Street View.  It would be
> wonderful help to this project, really.
>
> Cheers,
> Andrew
>
> On 31 March 2011 22:10, andrzej zaborowski 
> mailto:balr...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> On 31 March 2011 18:23, Ed Avis 
>> mailto:e...@waniasset.com>> wrote:
>>> Has anyone simply asked Google for permission to use Google Street View as a
>>> mapping aid?
>>
>> For the record, in East Europe where Google Street View has no
>> coverage, there's a an almost identical service provided by Norc.ro,
>> who explicitly allow usage in OSM.  And I have to say it's extra
>> useful, you can usually see all of the street signs, phone numbers on
>> shops' front windows and many other things.  If you've missed
>> something during survey you can go back "virtually" and fix it.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Ed Parsons,
> Geospatial Technologist
> Google
>
> Mobile: +44 (0)78 2538 2263
> Personal blog www.edparsons.com<http://www.edparsons.com>
> VC 38814629
> Registered Office: Belgrave House, 76 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 9TQ
> Registered in England Number: 3977902
>
> "It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy."

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Re: [OSM-talk] Okay, this is just cool (Lockport, NY)

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 31 March 2011 18:23, Ed Avis  wrote:
> Has anyone simply asked Google for permission to use Google Street View as a
> mapping aid?

I did just after your mail.  I was pointed out a paragraph in the
Terms of Use with a comment that it's Ok to check the odd street name
but systematic use would count to them as bulk extraction which the
ToU refers to.  There was also a comment that surely OSM is already
complete in those places with Street View coverage.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Okay, this is just cool (Lockport, NY)

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 1 April 2011 00:59, Nic Roets  wrote:
> One more argument in Pieren's favour: OSM is not for profit. On
> Slashdot a court case was recently mentioned where the judge ruled in
> favour of a non profit who copied a complete article from a
> copyrighted journal.

Right, but I think we can stop discussing copyright as in this case
Google is using their Terms of Use which is more like contract than
copyright license.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Okay, this is just cool (Lockport, NY)

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 31 March 2011 18:23, Ed Avis  wrote:
> Has anyone simply asked Google for permission to use Google Street View as a
> mapping aid?

For the record, in East Europe where Google Street View has no
coverage, there's a an almost identical service provided by Norc.ro,
who explicitly allow usage in OSM.  And I have to say it's extra
useful, you can usually see all of the street signs, phone numbers on
shops' front windows and many other things.  If you've missed
something during survey you can go back "virtually" and fix it.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Licensing Working Group

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 23 March 2011 11:37, Thomas Davie  wrote:
> I'm not sure this is the lie though.  The lie would be "zomg, not many users 
> are accepting the ODbL"

I don't think that would be a lie.  "Much" or "little" are of course
fuzzy but I think here you have to use a sort of a logarithmic scale
and I hope the license change working group is going to use that scale
when/if they're deciding whether the moment is right to remove data
from the editable database.

7% or 45% or 62% are all insignificantly small if you think of the
amount of map data that remains incompatible.  Even 98% is
insignificantly small if this means that 2% of the userbase's data is
going to be dropped.  For the license change to not leave the project
dead, the number needs to be really close to 100% of the user
collected (i.e. not imported) data.  1% of a couple hunderds GB is
really a lot of data, 0.1% is still probably more than some of the
individual country extracts, and then 0.01% is probably an amount that
we could afford losing if everyone put a lot of effort in fixing the
breakage.

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Re: [OSM-talk] [HOT] Nametagging: Local script versus

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 28 February 2011 21:40, Steve Doerr  wrote:
> On 28/02/2011 16:55, Ed Avis wrote:
>>
>> Jean-Marc Liotier  liotier.org>  writes:
>>
>>> By the way, for latin script names, should we use int_name, name:en or
>>> both ?
>>
>> If the name is still in Arabic, but Arabic written with the Latin
>> alphabet,
>> then name:ar@Latin would be correct.
>
> Did you just make that up, or is this use of the @ symbol a pre-existing
> standard?

The part after @ is the "modifier" in posix locales and is often used
for script type, see for example
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/LocaleMapping

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Re: [OSM-talk] Let's put more wikipedia-tags in OSM WAS Re: [OSM-dev] Some Questions about the Collaboration of OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 25 February 2011 17:20, M∡rtin Koppenhoefer  wrote:
> 2011/2/25 Zhijie Shen :
>> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 1:16 AM, M∡rtin Koppenhoefer
>>  wrote:
>>> display them as an overlay. We cannot (AFAIK) import those coordinates
>>> into OSM because we believe that they were mainly created from
>>> Googlemaps hence constitute a derived database [1].
>> Yes, I agree the coordinates cannot be directly imported into OSM,
>> otherwise, some inconsistence issues may occur.
>
>
> Actually the problem is more of a legal nature. We can't import them,
> because their copyright is not compatible with our community
> guidelines.

It is also technical, I suspect the way such an import would work out
would be similar to the EPA hazards import (or whatever).  It would be
only discrete nodes and both the type of the POI and the name to give
it would be difficult to obtain automatically from a wikipedia page.
The precision of the coordinates in WP also depends a lot on the types
of objects.  Some types of "infoboxes" could probably be treated
programatically but not much more.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Underground / hovering buildings

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 15 February 2011 23:11, Nathan Edgars II  wrote:
> Jacek Konieczny wrote:
>>
>> layer=-1 tells only that the thing is under layer=0 and over layer=-2,
>> nothing in relation to 'ground level' (some rivers or roads may have
>> layer=-1 or layer=1 on most of its length).
>>
> No, ground level is layer 0. A nonzero layer on a ground-level feature is an
> error.

That's never been a rule in OSM.  However, since the choice of the
level=0 feature is arbitrary there's nothing wrong with actually
assuming (as a producer, not consumer) 0 to mean the perceived ground
level and I usually do that.  That way I can at least re-tag my work
easily once there's a popular levels_above_ground tag.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Underground / hovering buildings

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 14 February 2011 22:37, Robin Paulson  wrote:
> On 15 February 2011 10:26, Andrew Guertin  wrote:
>> I have a few buildings that are not simply at ground level, and I can't
>> find how to map them on the wiki.
>>
>> First off, a skywalk between two buildings. Nothing fancy, although it
>> does go over a road.
>
> building=yes
> bridge=yes
> layer=1
>
>> Second, an underground building. Connects to other buildings that are at
>> ground level and have basements.
>>
>> Third, a building with a courtyard, and a basement that also extends
>> below the basement.
>>
>> Fourth a building that has been built into a cliff. At the top of the
>> cliff, on top of the building, are roads and sidewalks and things.
>>
>> Fifth, a building on a hill, with entrances variously on the third,
>> second, and first floor. One of the second floor entrances leads out
>> onto a "green roof", which has grass planted on it and connects to the
>> ground, but reaches out farther than the hill would naturally.
>>
>> Are there accepted ways to enter any of these buildings? If there's not
>> an accepted way, any thoughts on what I should do?
>
> the others are somewhat difficult - osm doesn't currently account for
> them very well. as with most maps, it is based on the assumption that
> 'ground' is consistent, and everything is a flat, thin item on top of
> it. until we think in a different paradigm, the instances you have
> listed will be difficult and only achievable by tags which are rather
> hacky in their nature (bridge, layer, level, etc.)

There's a proposal at
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Jongleur/MultiLevel_Building_Shapes
that works for some of these examples but for other uses would indeed
be hacky.  This proposed schema gained some popularity because there
are 3d renderers that understand it.

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Re: [OSM-talk] 12nm territorial borders - useful or rubbish?

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 14 February 2011 03:22, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
>   I've been thinking about the 12nm territorial borders on sea that we have
> in many places, notably in Europe. Many of them seem to have been
> auto-generated by simply placing a buffer around the coastline.
>
> My first question is, do they really have legal significance? They certainly
> give the impression of high precision, hugging every protruding bit of
> coastline in a safe distance.
>
> For example, if I am inside this triangle between Scotland and Ireland, will
> my legal status (concerning, say, fishing quotas, or whom I can marry on
> board of my vessel, or whatever funny things influcenced by international
> borders) be really any different from the status I had if I moved my vessel
> 2 miles in either direction?
>
>  http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=55.065&lon=-5.567&zoom=10&layers=M
>
> Or are we, by using these auto-generated (and perhaps not human-reviewed?)
> borders, suggesting a precision that isn't there? Would the UK coastguard
> have a good laugh when I claim to be in international waters at that
> location?
>
> My second question is, assuming that indeed there is significance to the 12
> nm boundary - should such auto-generated data be in OSM at all? If you're
> out on the sea, should whatever navigational aid you carry not compute by
> itself how far you are from the coast, rather than telling you whether
> you're to the left or to the right of a previously computed 12nm line?
>
> And my third question is, assuming that there are really good reasons for
> having these lines in OSM - who takes care of updating them once the
> coastline is modified by a mapper? I think it is a rather unique situation
> to have that kind of data-derived-from-other-OSM-data in OSM itself, and
> thus this has many of the same problems that an import would have (i.e. the
> source data has changed, what now).
>
> I'm not saying we should delete them; but whenever I see them on the map I
> tend to shrug and say "well, seems like someone was trying out his PostGIS
> skillz", and somehow I have the suspicion that the 12nm line as depicted on
> our maps may be little more than "that's what computer geeks do if you tell
> them the border is 12 miles out...".

I don't know how accurate these borders are, but I would prefer that
they stay because closed polygon borders are useful for many types of
spatial tasks.  If you remove those pieces of border, where are you
going to draw the border and why.  You might say tools should generate
the border in their pre-processing but unfortunately the 12 nm rules
is not universal.  It would also rise the entry level effort for tool
authors (for example in a render, should the implementation be part of
the code or part of the stylesheet?  Placement of borders is not
exactly a style issue)

I believe borders are no exception in OSM.  All data is best-effort,
no warranties.  They are improved when better data becomes available
and there are mappers with bandwidth to do the update.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Fwd: Re: collateral damage

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 11 February 2011 02:46, Mike N  wrote:
> On 2/10/2011 8:07 PM, Anthony wrote:
>>
>> Yes.  And it's telling me that by deleting contributions which have
>> absolutely nothing to do with my tracing from Google.
>
>  And you proved that tracing from Google imagery included no 'Easter Eggs' -
> how again?

To be completely fair, if you're tracing in an area that you know it'd
be hard to miss an 'easter egg' although I imagine something clever
could be hidden in there that even a local would copy as legitimate.
Are there known cases of imagery easter eggs?

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Re: [OSM-talk] Bing coverage - more levels

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 11 February 2011 02:43, Toby Murray  wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 6:27 PM, Dave F.  wrote:
>> At what zoom level to I have to be at to view an already zoomed in area to
>> view dark blue (z20)?
>>
>> I'm trying, but still failing to see the benefit in this.
>
> If enough of an area has been populated, it shows at pretty low zoom
> levels. Hey look, Topeka has z20 imagery!
>
> http://ant.dev.openstreetmap.org/bingimageanalyzer/?lat=39.704295331685074&lon=-95.39738145713467&zoom=8
>
> I do agree that it is a lot of effort for information that Bing must
> already have. *Looks at SteveC* Wouldn't be too hard to dump imagery
> boundaries into a shapefile or something, would it? :)

Most of the information has already been collected as some sort of
relations which higher accuracy than the red/green tiles, I can't say
for all planet, but at least in Europe.  Should be possible to import
that into the bingimageanalyzer.

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Re: [OSM-talk] magical road detector to play with

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 4 February 2011 15:16, John-Michael Wiley  wrote:
> The wiki page is not clear about what the version is supposed to be, is it
> for the version of OSM that output is written for or the version of the
> creator? I can do either, without much trouble.

I believe 0.6 is the expected value for version="", although it isn't
documented.  You can add the creator version at the end of creator="".

Cheers

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