date:20090305

On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 03:33:45AM -0800, Donald Allwright wrote:
> I would be very keen to take a leaf out of the GPL world here, and license 
> the data under
> "ODBL 1.0 or later".

The GPL gives the licensor the choice (section 14. Revised Versions of
this License.[1]):

“If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU
General Public License “or any later version” applies to it, you
have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that
numbered version or of any later version published by the Free
Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version
number of the GNU General Public License, you may choose any version
ever published by the Free Software Foundation.”

As you can see, the default is to fall back to allowing any version of
the GPL to apply.  Many people choose to use the suggested copying
permission statement, which includes “either version N of the License,
or (at your option) any later version”[2], but some choose to only allow
a specific version of the licence (the Linux kernel, for example).

So, yes, the ODbL should take a leaf out of the GPL’s book, and allow
the licensor to make the choice.  OSM can then choose the option that
suits it, which could well be “version N or later”.

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section14

-- 
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that works.—John Gall

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Re: [OSM-talk] Post tastsic questions of my own

On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 09:55:39AM +0100, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> (Has someone told you that you're overly concerned about your Fake self? 
> He seems to make an appearance in every second post you write.)

Fake Steve C = Steve C, you know it.  He just tries to make it out that
it’s all Richard F. ;)

Simon
-- 
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simple system that works.—John Gall


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Re: [OSM-talk] licence plan - Question about supplying own data

On Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 05:32:20PM -0800, SteveC wrote:
> I think it would be a beautiful day if it was seen as bad form to use  
> 'IANAL' and everything like that was instead rephrased as 'lets ask a  
> lawyer and I wont give you my opinion'

Ugh, so we’re not to question the lawyers now and just trust them?  I
know, you said it before, they’re the experts.  That doesn’t mean
everyone should just shut up.  If there’s one thing the non‐experts are
good at, it’s finding holes, the ones the experts don’t think of because
they are used to doing things a certain way.  Ask the experts a
question, they give an answer, they may even have to think about it, and
that’s when they start to question themselves—“why is it like this?”—and
improve their own understanding.

Simon
-- 
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simple system that works.—John Gall

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Re: [OSM-talk] licence plan - Question about supplying own data

On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 09:42:54AM -, Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists) 
wrote:
> One thing we should not loose sight of in this process is what OSM is
> collecting, and thus the limit of what we might wish to see contributed
> back. The locations of butterflies and endangered species are examples of
> transient data and some might argue it's not therefore something we would
> want in OSM anyway. Limiting the applicability of the licence to relevant
> data is not something I've personally thought about before, but it might
> need considering if it has not been thus far.

That assumes that derivative data always goes back to OSM.  If OSM
doesn’t want the locations of butterflies, then it doesn’t have to
incorporate it.  Someone else may want to use the locations of
butterflies.  If they’re licensed under a free licence, this should be
possible.  Distributing free data doesn’t mean always contributing
directly back to the original project (that’s quite restrictive IMO, and
fails the desert island test[1] (a test for free software, but the same
principle applies)), it means making it available for others to use.

[1]: http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html#desert_island
-- 
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simple system that works.—John Gall

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Re: [OSM-talk] It's all too fast...

2009-03-05 Thread luca delucchi

2009/3/5 graham 

>
> No, it's absolutely too fast. It's been discussed for a long time - but
> nearly entirely behind closed doors, with almost nothing concrete to see
> about progress on the legal mailing list (I'm not a subscriber, but have
> kept looking at the archives to check on what's happening - which most
> of the time has seemed to be 'Jordan's looking at it'). Gervase is
> entirely right.
>

Yes it's too fast, it's so difficult accept now the new license


> Graham
>
>
>
Luca
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Re: [OSM-talk] Conflating Tracks?

2009-03-05 Thread Nic Roets

Hello Daniel,

Hi Daniel,

I wrote a program (osmunda) that scans a GPX
tracklog for maneuvers that are 'impossible' according to the given
OSM data. There's a reasonable description of it in the 'routing' archive of
August 2008.

It's part of gosmore. Do an SVN checkout of one of the August / September
versions if you want to give it a try.

I know Gary68 has a tool for searching for routing irregularities, but at
some point, I'd like to implement a better one :
For each node a
  Calculate an, the location 10 meter North of a.
  If the route between a and an exceeds some threshold, flag the node as
suspect (e.g. maplint).
  Repeat for other directions (s, w, e).

Regards,
Nic
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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] License to kill

Hi,

Russ Nelson wrote:
> The barn down the road from me was standing on just four 9" beams.  We 
> kept saying "Boy, that barn has some structural problems.  It could fall 
> down at any time."  It didn't fall, and it didn't fall.  One might be 
> tempted to think that one could go into the barn and pull one valuable 
> things of one sort or another.  The barn finally fell down this winter.

Sure. But assume you have the choice of either replacing the barn today 
with one where you know the roof leaks and you'll have a hard time 
fixing it, or wait another few months for the barn designers to get 
their job done...

> and we're deciding whether the ODbL 
> meets our needs (I say "our" because I joined the Foundation a few days 
> ago.) 

I believe the Foundation intends to give a vote *only* to those who were 
members in good standing as of January 23rd so your few days had better 
be 40-ish if you want to have a say in the matter.

> Until the ODbL is finished, we kinda have nothing to talk about.  

1.

Are you aware that the initial OSMF timeline planned for ODbL final to 
come out on 28th March and OSMF member votes due on 7th April? Do you 
think that these 10 days would be sufficient to have a fruitful discussion?

2.

If we wait until it is finished and *then* complain about things that 
were known even now and that we could have helped to fix in advance of 
the date, then Steve would (for once) rightfully complain about people 
just sniping from the sides and not having an interest to help. No?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread Nop


Hi!



Ok, first of all, when I use the term "you" I don't mean you personally, 
I mean the OSMF as a group. I have no idea who's in charge of what 
there, I just know that none of you has taken care of an information 
process and you are currently listening.

SteveC schrieb:
>> But you have actually succeeded in making quite a number of people 
>> suspect malice - and warn others about that.
>>
>> I do not agree, but I think it is a natural reaction, especially in a 
>> community concerned about freedom:
>> - You keep me in the dark and suprise me
>> - You try to force my consent while I have had no chance to inform myself
> 
> Yeah I'm still baffled by this one... where have I or the license 
> working group tried to force any consent? I think we've been clear again 
> and again that the whole process is up for discussion.
> 
>> => What are you hiding? What are you up to?

I was trying to explain the way how many people have reacted to the 
proposed time table in absence of comprehensive and comprehensible 
information. And there's quite some posts on this list that express 
exactly that reaction.

You (the OSMF) have not been clear on anything - a clear, official 
announcement is exactly what is sorely missing.

>> It is your initiative. It is your job. And if you don't do a better 
>> job of including the community and breaking the news in an acceptable 
>> way to everybody really quick, I fear desaster. You are inviting 
>> hundreds of "No" decisions just because of bad information policy.
> 
> You can keep blaming me personally for everything. I think when Eve ate 
> that apple it was also my fault at least I think so.

(* Again - you as the OSMF).

> Or you could help build the process now.

I am sorry, but I cannot write the official information bulletin with 
your* ideas and your* intentions for you*. I also cannot take the 
initative for you*. And I cannot restore your credibility. You* will 
need to do that yourself. You* need to be source of the information.

What I can do is translate it into German and continue from there. 
Actually, I bet you* would be surprised about how many volunteers you* 
get to help you* in spreading the news -  if you* ever had started any 
organized information process. But I don't remember ever seeing a 
request: "Here we have the rationale we want everybody to understand - 
who can translate it?"

So maybe you* want to start a proper information campaign now?

I am waiting to help. And personally, I would prefer doing some 
constructive work for a good plan over opposing a disastrous plan any time.

> 
 This is the first time an ordinary OSM member had a chance to get 
 notice
 of the licence change and I bet you that there are 8 account 
 holders
 who still have no idea that anything is going on - so the process is
 just starting now. And we still have failed to give notice and
 understandable (translated) information to the majority of 
 participants.
>>> I want to correct something here, there is this view of 100,000 users 
>>> needing consent. The number is in fact far smaller for people who 
>>> ever made an edit (about 30% of the users). It's vastly smaller still 
>>> for anyone who has edited anything significant. It's an easier 
>>> problem than you might think, is what I'm saying. Far easier than 
>>> convincing you I don't have a satanic portal in my basement.
>>
>> You know what you're saying? You don't care about 10 people who 
>> are interested or want to contribute, you just care about the data of 
>> the 8000 (?) who have substantially contributed?
> 
> No that's your mad interpretation of what I said. Mad.
> 
>> This is a community. This is about people. At least it should be.
> 
> Look I invented that, and I concentrated on the people and not the 
> technology from the very beginning which is why this project succeeded 
> where others didn't.
> 
>> Can't you understand why people do not trust you and suspect you are 
>> just out to grab their work when you argue like this?

If you want the community to adopt the new licence (as opposed to fork 
off in protest), you need to convince the people in the community. If I 
think this way, I count 10 people who should at least be able to 
make an informed decision.

If you want to narrow it down to only the people who did significant 
edits, that is a suspiciously data-oriented view. The community also 
needs the people who are developing tools or who edit wiki pages or who 
are still working up to become big mappers. It would be great if they 
all consented rather than to split off.

Shouldn't the more important question be: "How many *people* do I 
loose?" instead of "How much *data* do I loose"? If we can agree on that 
then I guess I really misunderstood you there.


bye
Nop


PS: And I really don't care how many demons you keep in your basement. 
That's between you and your landlord. :-)


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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM Tile Layer in uDig?

2009-03-05 Thread Iván Sánchez Ortega

El Jueves, 5 de Marzo de 2009, Daniel A Carleton escribió:
> This question may have an obvious answer. Using this component will I
> need to serve my own tiles, or can I somehow proxy the main Mapnik
> servers?

No, my WMS implementation uses an old version of Osmarender and works directly 
against the XAPI. 


-- 
--
Iván Sánchez Ortega 

MSN:i_eat_s_p_a_m_for_breakf...@hotmail.com
Jabber:ivansanc...@jabber.org ; ivansanc...@kdetalk.net


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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread Martijn van Oosterhout

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 6:36 PM, Russ Nelson  wrote:
> I think it would be
> extremely helpful if the licenses themselves included an explanation for
> non-lawyers, in the way the gpl always did.
>
> Not always a good idea.  If your license has any ambiguities, then a judge
> will go outside your license to see if you've said anything else about the
> meaning of the license.  Potentially, anything you say about the license
> could become part of the license.  So your non-legal explanation actually
> may have legal import.

On the other hand, it's a good thing. In AU you have the Acts
Interpretation Act which explicitly states that any accompanying
rationale documents/discussions/etc to an act/bill must be taken into
account when considering it. The reason is that people aren't gods and
occasionally screw up and it's useful if the judge has the rationale
document saying what the *intended* ramifications were. Yes, the
rationale document is binding but it's often much more readable than
the act itself. If there's a contradiction, well that's what a judge
is for.

Given this licence is breaking new ground I think it's doubly
important to have an official FAQ/rationale/etc so that any future
judge has some proper source explaining the intended end results (as
opposed to the licence itself which only describes the means). You
don't want a judge who knows nothing about computing trying to *guess*
what you're trying to achieve, surely?

Have a nice day,
-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout  http://svana.org/kleptog/

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM Tile Layer in uDig?

2009-03-05 Thread Daniel A Carleton

On Mar 5, 2009, at 3:20 AM, Iván Sánchez Ortega wrote:
> There is a WMS-over-OSM implementation in the OSM SVN repository,  
> and it
> doesn't totally suck (you can read that as "it doesn't crash all the  
> time" -
> if it doesn't work in your environment, blame goes to me).

Ok, great, thanks.

This question may have an obvious answer. Using this component will I  
need to serve my own tiles, or can I somehow proxy the main Mapnik  
servers?

- Daniel

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[OSM-talk] Conflating Tracks?

2009-03-05 Thread Daniel A Carleton

Hello List,

Are any of you aware of a conflation algorithm that "snaps" GPS tracks  
to the street grid?  This could be a useful way to verify existing  
road networks and fill in any gaps.  e.g. I go out and ride on city  
streets, overlay my GPS track on the OSM grid, and the algorithm shows  
me where I traveled over unknown segments of road or deviated a  
disproportionate amount.

Cheers,

- Daniel


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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread MP

> as you said: "comments should explain things that *aren't* in the
> code", not repeat the code (incorrectly) in english. your example of a
> bad comment doesn't answer my question: if you are reading code and
> you do not understand why it is written the way it is, don't you read
> the comments to find out?

Comments allow also to see what is the code about - without needing to
fully understand what is in. Comments like "this function does fast
fourier transform" usually are enough to understand what the function
does (if you know what FFT  is) without need to look at the code and
all the bloody mathematical stuff inside (if you don't know about FFT
you won't have much idea about what the code does after reading it
anyway).

Same can be done for GPL for instance - "if you distribute GPL'd
program, you must give people complete source code and give them the
same rights to program you have". Maybe too simple (full details of
how can source be distributed, what exactly is source, etc ... are in
the license), but good enough for most people to have idea what they
can and cannot do with GPL'd stuff. We need the same for ODBL.

>>> did you come out of steve's evil basement portal of dooom? :-P
>>
>> I don't understand why people think steve has an evil portal of doom in his
>> basement.  It's in his attic.
>
> if thats in his attic, what were all those ghastly and inhuman screams
> coming from his basement?

Eh ... interdimensinal portal to the attic?

Martin

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] License to kill



On Mar 5, 2009, at 3:34 PM, OJ W wrote:


Given that maps need to be regularly updated to stay useful, anyone
relying on a CC-BY-SA loophole will be just as SOL if we change the
license in a year as if we changed it in time for april fools, as
their update stream stops when the license changes.


that's my argument from community, which I made last january in a  
comment on the OSM blog -- that the license doesn't matter -- and if  
you try to separate yourself from the community, you just cause your  
own shunning -- which is how the Amish feel about it.



However, changing to a license before finding out exactly how that
license works is like taking out Russ's barn beams and letting the
structure fall onto untested supports.



Several people have made that point, including 80N and SteveC (and  
maybe Andy Allen -- but I'm too lazy to do the research).  We don't  
want to wait too short a time before switching to the new license --  
NOR too long a time.  For better or worse, pro-bono lawyers are like  
open source programmers -- you can't make them work on a schedule.   
They work until they're satisfied with the result.


--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] License to kill

2009-03-05 Thread OJ W

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 7:34 PM, Russ Nelson  wrote:
> On Mar 5, 2009, at 1:10 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>  Also, the cost of staying with buggy old CC-BY-SA for a few months
> longer is rather negligible,
>
> The barn down the road from me was standing on just four 9" beams.  We kept
> saying "Boy, that barn has some structural problems.  It could fall down at
> any time."  It didn't fall, and it didn't fall.  One might be tempted to
> think that one could go into the barn and pull one valuable things of one
> sort or another.  The barn finally fell down this winter.
> If it's a bad idea to use the CC-BY-SA, it's a bad idea to use it for a few
> months longer.

Given that maps need to be regularly updated to stay useful, anyone
relying on a CC-BY-SA loophole will be just as SOL if we change the
license in a year as if we changed it in time for april fools, as
their update stream stops when the license changes.

However, changing to a license before finding out exactly how that
license works is like taking out Russ's barn beams and letting the
structure fall onto untested supports.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread Dave Stubbs

2009/3/5 Dave Stubbs :
> 2009/3/5 Russ Nelson :
>>
>> On Mar 5, 2009, at 2:54 PM, Matt Amos wrote:
>>
>>  us trying to read a complex license
>> without comments is like lawyers trying to read complex code without
>> comments.
>>
>> They're mostly hard to read because they're tedious in their detail.  Legal
>> writing isn't actually THAT impenetrable, if you can stay awake (no,
>> seriously, I can only read 2-3 licenses at a time before I start to nod off.
>>  Takes me DAYS to read all the OSI-approved licenses).
>>
>
> The whole code/comments analogy seems the wrong one. Most people are
> after the user manual -- I don't want a step by step description of
> how the license works, I want a nice manual telling me how to use it.
> And like most open source projects there currently isn't one (at least
> not an up-to-date one). And for pretty much the same reasons (lack of
> people who are not one of: busy coding, rubbish at writing manuals,
> don't understand the program).

And I should have added "don't understand the user" to that list. But
then I'm rubbish at writing manuals :-)

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread Dave Stubbs

2009/3/5 Russ Nelson :
>
> On Mar 5, 2009, at 2:54 PM, Matt Amos wrote:
>
>  us trying to read a complex license
> without comments is like lawyers trying to read complex code without
> comments.
>
> They're mostly hard to read because they're tedious in their detail.  Legal
> writing isn't actually THAT impenetrable, if you can stay awake (no,
> seriously, I can only read 2-3 licenses at a time before I start to nod off.
>  Takes me DAYS to read all the OSI-approved licenses).
>

The whole code/comments analogy seems the wrong one. Most people are
after the user manual -- I don't want a step by step description of
how the license works, I want a nice manual telling me how to use it.
And like most open source projects there currently isn't one (at least
not an up-to-date one). And for pretty much the same reasons (lack of
people who are not one of: busy coding, rubbish at writing manuals,
don't understand the program).

Dave

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 8:09 PM, Russ Nelson  wrote:
> On Mar 5, 2009, at 2:54 PM, Matt Amos wrote:
>>  us trying to read a complex license
>> without comments is like lawyers trying to read complex code without
>> comments.
>
> They're mostly hard to read because they're tedious in their detail.  Legal
> writing isn't actually THAT impenetrable, if you can stay awake (no,
> seriously, I can only read 2-3 licenses at a time before I start to nod off.
>  Takes me DAYS to read all the OSI-approved licenses).

and, as has been pointed out by steve and others, you can't 100%
understand a license unless you also understand the case law. so it
seems to me that some extra information (comments, advice - call it
what you will) is needed for those of us without 7-8 years of law
school and an army of paralegals.

> Yes, well, since a legal document is written for a customer, the lawyer
> explains it in confidence to the customer.  Everyone else is supposed to
> rely on the text of the license itself.  Or, at least, that's my experience
> of how it's supposed to go.  I may be wrong.

i guess its difficult having a whole community with varied opinions as
a "customer". with a single customer the question "well, what do you
want it to be like?" can be sensibly and quickly answered... does
anyone know if a similar situation arises in class action lawsuits?

cheers,

matt

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[OSM-talk] OSM group on linkedin has reached 400+ members

2009-03-05 Thread Rob

Just to let you guys know..

We have reached 400 members this week (429 actually)
Thanks for all your support and spread the OSM word !

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/61515/458CE625572D

Best regards
Rob
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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!



On Mar 5, 2009, at 2:54 PM, Matt Amos wrote:

 us trying to read a complex license
without comments is like lawyers trying to read complex code without
comments.


They're mostly hard to read because they're tedious in their detail.   
Legal writing isn't actually THAT impenetrable, if you can stay awake  
(no, seriously, I can only read 2-3 licenses at a time before I start  
to nod off.  Takes me DAYS to read all the OSI-approved licenses).



i understand, but lawyers have been doing this for a while and surely
they have a way of explaining stuff to people who aren't going to
understand hardcore legal documents.


Yes, well, since a legal document is written for a customer, the  
lawyer explains it in confidence to the customer.  Everyone else is  
supposed to rely on the text of the license itself.  Or, at least,  
that's my experience of how it's supposed to go.  I may be wrong.



if thats in his attic, what were all those ghastly and inhuman screams
coming from his basement?


Oh, that's from the people who've ridden home with him in the back  
seat of his convertible.


--
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http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
r...@cloudmade.com - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 7:18 PM, Russ Nelson  wrote:
> On Mar 5, 2009, at 1:06 PM, Matt Amos wrote:
>> ummm good? as long as the explanation doesn't contradict the
>> license, what is the problem?
>
> The problem is that you've got an impedance mismatch.  If you comment about
> your license, it can become PART OF your license, which means that you need
> to be careful that everything you say has a proper legal meaning, which
> breaks the idea of explaining things without using legalese.

i assumed from your explanation that the judge, realising that he's
going outside the license for context, wouldn't apply the same
hardcore legal interpretation to these comments.

in any case, isn't the cat out of the bag anyway with the comments on
the co-ment.net site? wouldn't a court look to those as well?

>> but if the code confuses you then you read the comments for
>> enlightenment, right?
>
>   /* Add one to the length */
>   length += l;

as you said: "comments should explain things that *aren't* in the
code", not repeat the code (incorrectly) in english. your example of a
bad comment doesn't answer my question: if you are reading code and
you do not understand why it is written the way it is, don't you read
the comments to find out?

to turn the analogy around: us trying to read a complex license
without comments is like lawyers trying to read complex code without
comments.

>> i don't think you're saying that code without
>> comments is OK (although a "heated discussion" to have on another day,
>> perhaps), so why should a license without an explanation be OK?
>
> Code: interpreted by computer; comments: interpreted by a human.

code is interpreted both by a computer and humans, but i understand your point.

> License: interpreted by a human; comments: interpreted by a human.  And my
> point from above is that the barrier between the two is not hard and fast.

i understand, but lawyers have been doing this for a while and surely
they have a way of explaining stuff to people who aren't going to
understand hardcore legal documents. maybe we could have a background
image repeating "without prejudice" all over the document? just as a
compiler shouldn't interpret comments, isn't there a way of shielding
comments from the court?

>> did you come out of steve's evil basement portal of dooom? :-P
>
> I don't understand why people think steve has an evil portal of doom in his
> basement.  It's in his attic.

if thats in his attic, what were all those ghastly and inhuman screams
coming from his basement?

cheers,

matt

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Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] License to kill



On Mar 5, 2009, at 1:10 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:


 Also, the cost of staying with buggy old CC-BY-SA for a few months
longer is rather negligible,


The barn down the road from me was standing on just four 9" beams.  We  
kept saying "Boy, that barn has some structural problems.  It could  
fall down at any time."  It didn't fall, and it didn't fall.  One  
might be tempted to think that one could go into the barn and pull one  
valuable things of one sort or another.  The barn finally fell down  
this winter.


If it's a bad idea to use the CC-BY-SA, it's a bad idea to use it for  
a few months longer.  Just because its barn hasn't fallen doesn't mean  
that the risk is not increasing.  Everybody knew that the Johnstown  
dam was going to go ... when it finally did, nobody paid attention  
because they didn't believe it actually HAD gone out.


But all this discussion is kinda pointless.  There are two things  
going on here: the ODbL is being drafted, and we're deciding whether  
the ODbL meets our needs (I say "our" because I joined the Foundation  
a few days ago.)  Until the ODbL is finished, we kinda have nothing to  
talk about.  Yes, the ODbL is being drafted with our specific needs in  
mind, so if the first published version doesn't meet our needs, we can  
go back to the well and ask for a revision.  But until the ODbL is  
finished, we're spinning our wheels.  Can we assume that the lawyers  
understand the problem and are working on a solution?


--
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http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!



On Mar 5, 2009, at 1:06 PM, Matt Amos wrote:



ummm good? as long as the explanation doesn't contradict the
license, what is the problem?


The problem is that you've got an impedance mismatch.  If you comment  
about your license, it can become PART OF your license, which means  
that you need to be careful that everything you say has a proper legal  
meaning, which breaks the idea of explaining things without using  
legalese.



but if the code confuses you then you read the comments for
enlightenment, right?


  /* Add one to the length */
  length += l;


i don't think you're saying that code without
comments is OK (although a "heated discussion" to have on another day,
perhaps), so why should a license without an explanation be OK?


Code: interpreted by computer; comments: interpreted by a human.

License: interpreted by a human; comments: interpreted by a human.   
And my point from above is that the barrier between the two is not  
hard and fast.



did you come out of steve's evil basement portal of dooom? :-P


I don't understand why people think steve has an evil portal of doom  
in his basement.  It's in his attic.


--
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Re: [OSM-talk] License to kill

2009-03-05 Thread Peter Miller

On 5 Mar 2009, at 17:36, Matt Amos wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Grant Slater
>  wrote:
>> COMMUNITY HELP... Could I ask some guys to please go through the list
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Use_Cases
>>
>> And flag which one still require a response from the OSMF lawyer
>> including those that require extra explanation to the lawyer.
>> Peter Miller has also suggested on the talk page that some items  
>> might
>> be appropriate to merge.
>
> done.
>
> i've stuck some brightly coloured bits of text where either the lawyer
> needs information from us, or where we need advice from the lawyer.
> for the avoidance of doubt, i encourage everyone to look over the page
> in case i have missed something :-)
>

I am going through the Use Cases at present, clarifying the language,  
generalising and merging in some cases, and ensuring that each use  
case only tests one element of the license or one particular  
application.

While doing this I have been dumping the legal review text where I  
have changed the language but do remember the legal review is both  
available in the history for the page and on the pdf that michael  
published on the foundation website.

Bear with me for the next hour or so.

Regards,

Peter

> cheers,
>
> matt
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] License to kill

Hi,

Peter Miller wrote:
>> If we get 99% there with version 1.0 and version 2.0 takes the next
>> two years then the cost benefit, to me, would suggest 1.0 as the
>> better deal.
> 
> Lets first get the consultation input into Jordan, then lets read the  
> updated draft, then comment again if that is requested, then wait for  
> the final draft for version 1.

Yes. "For the avoidance of doubt", the current draft is IMO nowhere even 
near "99% there" and it is absolutely clear that changes have to be 
made. Also, the cost of staying with buggy old CC-BY-SA for a few months 
longer is rather negligible, so any cost-benefit analysis would have to 
take that into account. It's not that our house is burning and we need 
someone with a hose quickly.

> We can then decide as a community if we  
> are happy to proceed (which I think we will). If there is a big  
> problem then I suspect that a version 1.1 could be turned round  
> quickly to address it.

Good for you to be optimistic, however I quote Rufus Pollock from 
odc-discuss:

"I'd also point out that it will be possible upgrade the license (a
v2.0 if you like) though that is not likely to happen that quickly
after a v1.0 release."

The worst that could happen would be to talk people into accepting a 
buggy 1.0 with the promise of a quick upgrade to a fixed 1.1 and then 
seeing 1.1 take forever.

It's not that I expect a license to be perfect, none will ever be; I 
just expect us to fix the bugs we already see, and reserve the upgrade 
mechanism for those that pop up later, rather than rushing through 
something where we already have a list of known bugs.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 5:36 PM, Russ Nelson  wrote:
> On Mar 5, 2009, at 12:19 PM, graham wrote:
>
>> I think it would be
>> extremely helpful if the licenses themselves included an explanation for
>> non-lawyers, in the way the gpl always did.
>
> Not always a good idea.  If your license has any ambiguities, then a judge
> will go outside your license to see if you've said anything else about the
> meaning of the license.  Potentially, anything you say about the license
> could become part of the license.  So your non-legal explanation actually
> may have legal import.

ummm good? as long as the explanation doesn't contradict the
license, what is the problem?

> In principle, you're suggesting that code should be explained in the
> comments, when actually, comments should explain things that *aren't* in the
> code.

isn't it more like comments having an effect on program behaviour
(like openmp annotations)? i'm not endorsing it - its really nasty to
work with - just trying to clarify the analogy... :-(

> If you want to know what the code says, you should be reading the
> code, not the comments.  If you want to know what a legal agreement says,
> you should read it.

but if the code confuses you then you read the comments for
enlightenment, right? i don't think you're saying that code without
comments is OK (although a "heated discussion" to have on another day,
perhaps), so why should a license without an explanation be OK? i've
been looking at the use cases for this sort of extra information, but
it wouldn't hurt to have more information, especially in lay language
that can be translated for our non-english-speaking comrades.

> It's tedious, yes, but I've read every one of the OSI
> approved Open Source licenses at least twice, and I lived through it.  if
> you call this living, of course.  I could be a zombie, and how would you
> know??

did you come out of steve's evil basement portal of dooom? :-P

cheers,

matt

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Re: [OSM-talk] What if ODBl 1.0 is superseeded by ODBl 2.0

2009-03-05 Thread Ed Avis

Frederik Ramm  remote.org> writes:

>I am surprised that none of the respondents seem to have read the 
>license draft which clearly states that "a later version of this 
>license" is allowable, as is "a license compatible with this license".

Hmm, I would prefer it if they didn't put that in the licence itself but left it
to individual projects to decide if they are willing to license under 'ODbL 1,
or (at your option) any later version', as the GPL does.

I'll mention this on the legal mailing list just as soon as I can get messages
through to it (at the moment, at least when sent via Gmane, they seem to get
lost somewhere waiting for moderator approval or something).

-- 
Ed Avis 

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread David Lynch

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 04:57, Andy Allan  wrote:
> If you look at the license plan you'll see it comes in the following stages:
>
> 1) Make the plan and the draft public. Ask for feedback.
> 2) Wait for feedback to be taken into account and expect/hope for a
> final version of the ODbL
> 3) See if the OSMF board approves
> 4) See if OSMF members like what results
> 5) If they do, then start asking the rest of the community

> Maybe we've found some people who want to be invovled in stage 1 who
> didn't realise until now that they did. Good. It's nice to have more
> people interested.

Agreed. It's a good thing that we're getting interest now and not
after it's too late.

I think some of the anger that's resulted from all of this is because
we're writing an OSM license -- yes, I know it's not *just* an OSM
license, but we look to be the first big user and seem to be one of
the major forces behind its creation -- at arm's length through ODC.
The "dark side" of the free-as-in-speech nature of open
source/databases/etc. is that people get very unhappy when they feel
like they haven't been able to contribute. Not having the license as
an OSM project, or even prominently pointed out from the OSM site,
makes people feel left out.

I think three months would be reasonable if a finalized ODbL 1.0 had
been published for a while or we were going to some other license that
had already had the what-ifs answered and/or dealt with, but when the
text isn't finalized yet and there's already a timeline with specific
dates to move to the new license, it feels like we're being pushed.

Personally, I'd love to see 5 moved up to before or concurrent with 3
and 4, even if it's just a straw poll that results in "x% say they
they think OSM should adopt ODbL, y% say they would probably agree to
the license but think it still needs work, z% say they don't want to
change, and w% of the people who logged in didn't answer the poll." I
assume that there would be a second vote required to actually approve
moving to the new license, but it lets people feel like they're
involved before the OSMF and/or its board make any decision.

-- 
David J. Lynch
djly...@gmail.com

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!



On Mar 5, 2009, at 12:19 PM, graham wrote:

I think it would be
extremely helpful if the licenses themselves included an explanation  
for

non-lawyers, in the way the gpl always did.


Not always a good idea.  If your license has any ambiguities, then a  
judge will go outside your license to see if you've said anything else  
about the meaning of the license.  Potentially, anything you say about  
the license could become part of the license.  So your non-legal  
explanation actually may have legal import.


In principle, you're suggesting that code should be explained in the  
comments, when actually, comments should explain things that *aren't*  
in the code.  If you want to know what the code says, you should be  
reading the code, not the comments.  If you want to know what a legal  
agreement says, you should read it.  It's tedious, yes, but I've read  
every one of the OSI approved Open Source licenses at least twice, and  
I lived through it.  if you call this living, of course.  I could be a  
zombie, and how would you know??


--
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http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
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Re: [OSM-talk] License to kill

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Grant Slater
 wrote:
> COMMUNITY HELP... Could I ask some guys to please go through the list
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Use_Cases
>
> And flag which one still require a response from the OSMF lawyer
> including those that require extra explanation to the lawyer.
> Peter Miller has also suggested on the talk page that some items might
> be appropriate to merge.

done.

i've stuck some brightly coloured bits of text where either the lawyer
needs information from us, or where we need advice from the lawyer.
for the avoidance of doubt, i encourage everyone to look over the page
in case i have missed something :-)

cheers,

matt

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread graham

Richard Fairhurst wrote:

> I know it's not always easy but we're none of us great at communication,
> we're none of us actually paid to think that carefully about what we write,
> so it's all too easy to get wound up in a http://xkcd.com/386/ kind of way.
> At which point Steve does something between amused and sarcastic, Frederik
> does deadpan, I do flying off the handle, Etienne does inscrutable, someone
> on talk-de will do BAN POTLATCH!!1!1?lol, etc. etc.

Yes, but unfortunately the result is that various threads which were at 
least discussing/explaining (however confusedly) substantive issues seem 
to have been hijacked into an attack/defend SteveC thread, which I 
suspect doesn't interest many people.

I really want a better understanding of the licenses and their 
consequences in terms which a non-lawyer can understand and convey to 
other people. It doesn't help telling me 'this is magic stuff only a 
lawyer could understand'. For example, the Italian list is discussing 
the license in a way which I think shows it's really not understood, but 
I'm not sure enough of my own understanding to try to explain - maybe 
they are right and I'm wrong (this centres on the nature of the 
relationship between the database and factual licenses). The best way I 
can see to get the explanation at the moment is by listening to 
substantive discussions on this list. Longer term, I think it would be 
extremely helpful if the licenses themselves included an explanation for 
non-lawyers, in the way the gpl always did.

Graham

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] License to kill

2009-03-05 Thread Peter Miller

On 5 Mar 2009, at 16:09, SteveC wrote:

>
> On 4 Mar 2009, at 23:24, 80n wrote:
>>
>> We shouldn't let other people's timescales force our own decisions.
>> If more time is needed, and there is a lot of opinion that suggests
>> it is, if the current issues cannot be resolved by April 1 then of
>> course we have the option to give ourselves more time.
>
>
> Sure but we can also build a space laser if we want to. You're taking
> the benefit side in to account but not the cost.
>
> If we get 99% there with version 1.0 and version 2.0 takes the next
> two years then the cost benefit, to me, would suggest 1.0 as the
> better deal.
>

Lets first get the consultation input into Jordan, then lets read the  
updated draft, then comment again if that is requested, then wait for  
the final draft for version 1. We can then decide as a community if we  
are happy to proceed (which I think we will). If there is a big  
problem then I suspect that a version 1.1 could be turned round  
quickly to address it.

So

Rather than distracting us with discussion of space lasers possibly  
you could help us by commenting on some of the open issues.

I would like you opinion on a few particular ones:
1) What is a substantial extract?
2) What happens in places where there is no database directive?
3) What is the Boundary between a Database and a Produced Work
4) Approval from large donated datasets
5) Which features can be retained in the license change?
6) How can one control what is done with a Produced Work that has been  
released under Public Domain?

These issues and others can be found here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Open_Issues

Regards,

Peter

> Best
>
> Steve
>
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread Richard Fairhurst

Pierre-André Jacquod wrote:
> Was a surprised by the announcement. Read the license and mails. 
> Would probably have said yes.
>
> But I do not like the way this went on. The fact that those who want 
> to change it just say "you do not want to help". That's my free time,
> that's your's.

Seriously, don't react to the style, react to the substance.

I know it's not always easy but we're none of us great at communication,
we're none of us actually paid to think that carefully about what we write,
so it's all too easy to get wound up in a http://xkcd.com/386/ kind of way.
At which point Steve does something between amused and sarcastic, Frederik
does deadpan, I do flying off the handle, Etienne does inscrutable, someone
on talk-de will do BAN POTLATCH!!1!1?lol, etc. etc. < lots of hints for
Fake blogs there

But none of that matters, really. If we're to get things done then
occasionally biting your lip is helpful. The number of mails I write to this
list and then close before sending...

cheers
Richard
-- 
View this message in context: 
http://www.nabble.com/OSM-license-change%3A-A-license-to-kill---%3E-How-to-make-a-nightmare-come-true%21-tp22325041p22355771.html
Sent from the OpenStreetMap - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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Re: [OSM-talk] licence plan - Question about supplying own data


On 5 Mar 2009, at 08:36, David Earl wrote:

> (lost track of who said this, but...)
>>> Very unlikely, derived individual coordinates are facts. I've asked
>>> multiple lawyers about this personally.
>>>
>> Are you saying that facts that are derived from a Produced Work are
>> not covered by the reverse engineering clause?
>>>
>>> If I derive the location of all the street corners of a city from a
>>> rendered map then that is just a collection of facts and not a
>>> reverse engineered recreation of the original database?  If so, it
>>> doesn't seem like the reverse engineering clause is worth the paper
>>> its written on.
>
> Ordnance Survey seems to take a different view, which is precisely the
> reason OSM exists. In a way it doesn't matter whether you, I, or  
> even a
> bunch of lawyers think the opposite if OS can sink OSM just by sucking
> OSM into a massively expensive legal action.
>
> But "all the street corners" may individually be facts, but the
> collection of them is a database which you've recreated. The whole  
> point
> about database IP protection is that there is value in the collection
> when any individual piece of content is either not protectable or not
> worth protecting.
>
> It would be really nice if a court would actually decide (in a case
> involving someone who can afford to defend themselves) whether someone
> geolocating their photo from an OS base and publishing it (or even
> quoting a grid reference in a book) infringes OS IP, and especially
> where derivation starts. I did actually try asking OS this once - I  
> put
> a set of scenarios to them ranging from quoting a grid reference to
> tracing lines, and all I got back was "it's too complicated to answer,
> we'd be delighted to offer you a license for your circumstances".

Yes then we would have case law to wave around. What did you think of  
my idea on geowanking that I posted here again yesterday?


http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-general/2008-November/30.html



>
>
> David
>
>
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Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread Pierre-André Jacquod

SteveC wrote:
> On 4 Mar 2009, at 23:42, Nop wrote:
> 
>> Hi!
>>
>> SteveC schrieb:
>>> To me this is similar to "ignorance of the law is no defence". The   
>>> data, people and facts are out there and it's not our job to serve   
>>> them up to you in the specific best way you want. We will help all  
>>> we  can when you ask though.
>> Thank your for bringing it down to this simple point.
> 
> np
> 
>> Actually, it *IS* your job.
>>
>> That simple. You want a change. You want their consent. Your job.
> 
> Well if you think about it you would want it too, right. Oh you're the  
> guy who doesn't want to help.. I forgot.

Sorry, I did not really cared about it. Could have been PD from the begin.

Was a surprised by the announcement. Read the license and mails. Would
probably have said yes.

But I do not like the way this went on. The fact that those who want to
change it just say "you do not want to help". That's my free time,
that's your's.
If you think the change is important for the OSM, the better. If you
want to do it, your right. But take the burden on you, inform people,
ask opinions, and be aware that there are some that disagree, and some
indifferent.

I do not say you do not help because you do come here helping me mapping
my remote place. Your sentences are only rude. F#@@#

now I CARE. If I have to choose now, I will say NO. Not due to the
license, just due to sarcastic, overstated comments.

first & last time I loose time on this subject until it is handled on a
factual basis.

regards

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!


On 5 Mar 2009, at 03:35, Frederik Ramm wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Andy Allan wrote:
>> 1) Make the plan and the draft public. Ask for feedback.
>> 2) Wait for feedback to be taken into account and expect/hope for a
>> final version of the ODbL
>> 3) See if the OSMF board approves
>> 4) See if OSMF members like what results
>
> The word "final" should probably be struck out here because it has  
> kind
> of "gun to your head" ring to it: Take this license or be stuck with
> CC-BY-SA forever.

Agreed, I don't think that's the intention.

> Instead, if either the OSMF board, or the members, are unhappy with  
> the
> license (which is quite likely given that only ONE week is scheduled  
> for
> phase 2 and I can safely say that the status quo would not pass a  
> vote),
> then we need a new iteration; what is your "final" version then  
> becomes
> the draft, and back to phase 1.

Lets expand it from one week then?

> And this must be made clear when the vote is taken; that this is not a
> vote about "ODbL now or CC-BY-SA forever" but a vote about "ODbL or  
> wait
> for revisions".

Right... but we should quantify what the cost/benefit of that will be.

Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

Great post Dair!

On 5 Mar 2009, at 02:04, Dair Grant wrote:

> Nop wrote:
>
>>> I want to correct something here, there is this view of 100,000  
>>> users
>>> needing consent. The number is in fact far smaller for people who  
>>> ever
>>> made an edit (about 30% of the users). It's vastly smaller still for
>>> anyone who has edited anything significant. It's an easier problem  
>>> than
>>> you might think, is what I'm saying. Far easier than convincing  
>>> you I
>>> don't have a satanic portal in my basement.
>>
>> You know what you're saying? You don't care about 10 people who  
>> are
>> interested or want to contribute, you just care about the data of the
>> 8000 (?) who have substantially contributed?
>
> That's not what he is saying at all.
>
> Nobody is planning to ditch contributions below some threshold for  
> the sake
> of it, however things should not stall simply because one person who's
> contributed one post-box two years ago can't be contacted any more.
>
> All he's saying is that although we might have 100K registered  
> users, only
> 30K of them have made an edits whatsoever.
>
> Looking at the stats page, only about 8K are making edits each month  
> (a
> different 8K each month, sure).
>
> This paper (http://tinyurl.com/5p2w65) looked at contributors in the  
> UK, and
> found that of the 1100 users in their sample some 92 of them had  
> contributed
> 80% of the data (or 0.08% - about 8K again, a nice coincidence).
>
>
>> This is a community. This is about people. At least it should be.
>>
>> Can't you understand why people do not trust you and suspect you are
>> just out to grab their work when you argue like this?
>
> Nobody is trying to grab anyone's work. Doing so would take far less  
> effort.
>
> But a licence change is effectively like an (internal) fork, and we  
> may find
> that some people disagree so strongly that their contributions can't  
> be
> carried forward.
>
> Or simply that we decide to be very cautious, and feel we can't take  
> forward
> data we can't be 100% sure about.
>
> It's sensible to understand just what impact that would have, since  
> we are
> going to lose some data no matter what (some contributors are now  
> dead;
> we're not going to contact their relatives, so we either  
> unilaterally put
> their data under a new licence or we remove it).
>
>
>> Even though I am in favour of the licence itself, this way of  
>> thinking
>> is unacceptable to me.
>
> So what are you doing to help?
>
>
> -dair
> ___
> d...@refnum.com  http://www.refnum.com/
>
>
>
> ___
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>

Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

You too Andy, great post.

On 5 Mar 2009, at 02:57, Andy Allan wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 12:40 AM, MP  wrote:
>>> Yes. At least when you expect 10 people to go along and the  
>>> issue
>>> has the potential to break OSM apart, it would not be a bad idea  
>>> to send
>>> monthly information about the state of things.
>>
>> Hmm ... perhaps sometimes it would be good to mass-email all members
>> when it is about changes with possibly devastating (mass deletion)
>> effect. Not everybody reads various blogs or parts of wiki around  
>> OSM,
>> but almost everybody reads their email.
>
> Hang on, here's something which has been misunderstood. There's a good
> reason that we haven't emailed all 100,000 people yet. We're not sure
> whether the OSMF endorses the new license, which is itself still in a
> draft. If you look at the license plan (
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Implementation_Plan
> ) you'll see it comes in the following stages:
>
> 1) Make the plan and the draft public. Ask for feedback.
> 2) Wait for feedback to be taken into account and expect/hope for a
> final version of the ODbL
> 3) See if the OSMF board approves
> 4) See if OSMF members like what results
> 5) If they do, then start asking the rest of the community
>
> *So we're at point 1*. We've always assumed that if you're the kind of
> person who wants to be involved in drafting licenses, reviewing
> incomplete licenses and so on you'll get involved. Most people
> probably don't care. That's why legal-talk subscriptions aren't
> compulsory in order to use the API.
>
> If you feel left out of stage 3, then maybe you should become a member
> of the OSMF. That's what it's there for. But again, not everyone is
> interested in the running of the project, doing behind the scenes
> stuff, holding the OSMF Board to account etc. Which is why OSMF
> membership isn't compulsory either.
>
> There's all chances that the OSMF members won't vote for the license,
> in which case it won't be put to the community at all Or maybe they
> will. The way the plan is seems to me a sensible staged approach of
> involvment - first the Board, then the Members, then the community at
> large. It needs to get through all three stages to work, and if any
> group disapproves, it stops. And we involve the smallest group first,
> then a bigger, then the biggest.
>
> Now because things are being done publicly, lots of people who are
> only interested in stage 5 think that we've skipped a few stages.
> Maybe we've found some people who want to be invovled in stage 1 who
> didn't realise until now that they did. Good. It's nice to have more
> people interested.
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>
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Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-talk] Front page design and SEO

2009-03-05 Thread Robert (Jamie) Munro

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Tom Hughes wrote:
>> I'm not sure delegating to all sort of different servers is the best
>> way to implement such a thing for lots of reasons. We just need the
>> master stylesheet to be able to take location into account when
>> rendering.
>
> That's how Google does it of course and it is, issues of scale aside,
> the easy choice. (And yes their motorway style changes, slightly, at
> many borders e.g. between Germany and France or Austria; maybe that's to
> denote toll motorways though and not a specifc national style.)
>
>> Aside from anything else if you did it by delegation the style could
>> only change on the edge of a tile.
>
> No; if done cleverly, national servers could produce half transparent
> tiles at the borders. I know it would be quite a feat to set up
> something like this, and every time you view a map of Europe then half
> the tiles would be missing because the Czech or Austrian or Hungarian or
> German server had a hiccup at that moment and so on. But it would be a
> really cool thing to have and help us get away from ugly centralism. We
> work and map and meet regionally; why not champion an architecture that
> actually takes this into account.

Yuk! No! Don't do this! Why produce half-transparent tiles when you
could just carry on producing tiles of the neighbouring countries (or
even the whole world) in your national style.

As a British person who travels to Paraguay, I want to see a map of
Paraguay in UK styles (and probably English captions where available).
The Mapnik layer currently gives me that. There's no need to take that
away when we implement a Paraguay style map. What we need is entire
global renderings in different styles.

I hate it when I go on holiday and I can't understand the colours of the
maps. A choice of UK Style, German Style, USA Style rendering for the
whole world would be nice, particularly if it defaulted to whichever
country you were in by IP address geolocation. I'm sure it will be
easier to impliment than a single map with inconsistent syle, and I'm
fairly confident that the resources required are not huge - particulary
as introducing new layer servers reduces the load on the existing single
tile server.

Robert (Jamie) Munro
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Re: [OSM-talk] licence plan - Question about supplying own data

2009-03-05 Thread David Earl

(lost track of who said this, but...)
>> Very unlikely, derived individual coordinates are facts. I've asked
>> multiple lawyers about this personally.
>>
> Are you saying that facts that are derived from a Produced Work are  
> not covered by the reverse engineering clause?
>>
>> If I derive the location of all the street corners of a city from a  
>> rendered map then that is just a collection of facts and not a  
>> reverse engineered recreation of the original database?  If so, it  
>> doesn't seem like the reverse engineering clause is worth the paper  
>> its written on.

Ordnance Survey seems to take a different view, which is precisely the 
reason OSM exists. In a way it doesn't matter whether you, I, or even a 
bunch of lawyers think the opposite if OS can sink OSM just by sucking 
OSM into a massively expensive legal action.

But "all the street corners" may individually be facts, but the 
collection of them is a database which you've recreated. The whole point 
about database IP protection is that there is value in the collection 
when any individual piece of content is either not protectable or not 
worth protecting.

It would be really nice if a court would actually decide (in a case 
involving someone who can afford to defend themselves) whether someone 
geolocating their photo from an OS base and publishing it (or even 
quoting a grid reference in a book) infringes OS IP, and especially 
where derivation starts. I did actually try asking OS this once - I put 
a set of scenarios to them ranging from quoting a grid reference to 
tracing lines, and all I got back was "it's too complicated to answer, 
we'd be delighted to offer you a license for your circumstances".

David


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Re: [OSM-talk] Post tastsic questions of my own


On 5 Mar 2009, at 04:50, Gustav Foseid wrote:
> Are you stirring dissent? Are you trying to build
> a consensus?
>
> I have provided my view, that the idea behind the license is better  
> than the current CC-BY-SA, but that some legal aspects needs to be  
> sorted out. We have one person from a major Norwegian provider of  
> online maps on the list. He seems to have the same view as "the  
> other Steve, that a change is eagerly anticipated by traditional  
> cartographers.

That sounds cool.

> Do you think you're cool enough to fork or do you want to
> build something better? Because we love you.
>
> Please... Could you, in addition to asking others to be more  
> positive in their communication, live up to that yourself.

Sure! As long a FakeSteveC balances it out. :-)

Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread Ben Laenen

On Thursday 05 March 2009, SteveC wrote:
> On 4 Mar 2009, at 23:51, Nop wrote:
> >>> 2. Provide translations of this in the major languages. Most
> >>> people speak English to some degree, but some don't and something
> >>> of this importance and with so much legalese involved does need
> >>> to be in your
> >>> native language to be sure you understood it. Keep translations
> >>> current,
> >>> also.
> >>
> >> That would be great, when will you start organising them?
> >
> > Would have been the job of OSMF in a more diplomatic process.
> >
> > It seems you didn't get my point. A convincing attempt at informing
> > the community would have had to be organized by the OSMF, not by
> > volunteers stepping in to fix parts of a bungled job.
>
> The OSMF *are* volunteers. I'll count you out from pitching in your
> help then!


Right, but volunteering to be in the OSMF is actually volunteering to do 
all these kinds of tasks, right? Or am I seeing it wrong and is it just 
there to decide some things now and then without really bothering about 
it let others sort everything out?

Ben

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Re: [OSM-talk] Post tastsic questions of my own


On 5 Mar 2009, at 02:13, Edoardo 'Yossef' Marascalchi wrote:

> SteveC wrote:
>> are opinions beyond we will all be better. Really. All of you who
>> have IM'd me or emailed with your kind words, jump in here and keep  
>> at
>> it. We'll build a better world with unicorns and water that runs  
>> uphill.
>>
>>
> I replied you privately just because I used a style I usually don't
> use.. but.. i  want to thank you for your email here again! :D
> I liked your email, the coders-lawyers parallel and the general  
> message
> it sent.
>> My second question goes to those who live in the various countries
>> that aren't bankrupt... oh I mean those that aren't in the UK. How is
>> the community there? Is it bad? Is it good? How can we help. What are
>> *you* doing to help? Are you stirring dissent? Are you trying to  
>> build
>> a consensus? Do you think you're cool enough to fork or do you want  
>> to
>> build something better? Because we love you. You are bridging a  
>> divide
>> between the foundation, the evil british empire, and all those poor
>> non-english speaking souls. Really, you do a lot of work to
>> communicate between lists what's going on and if you only report the
>> bad stuff then you're responsible for it.. But I don't think you are,
>> are you? Because it's much better if we build a consensus and a happy
>> coexistence of friends toward a free, open, libre, stunning,
>> beautiful, fantastic map of the world.
>>
> You know, we (as italian) are a little bit melodrammatic :D
> We thought some "evil" derive was  acting in the licence writing but i
> read the draft and i don't found any evillness (as INAL).
> So, now  I will try to do know is to ask italian OSM community to read
> and comment the draft...

Great. Are you doing much translation back and forth?

Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-talk] Post tastsic questions of my own


On 4 Mar 2009, at 19:46, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:

> On Thursday 05 March 2009 07:37:28 SteveC wrote:
>> My second question goes to those who live in the various countries
>> that aren't bankrupt... oh I mean those that aren't in the UK. How is
>> the community there? Is it bad? Is it good? How can we help
>
> as far as India is concerned we are too busy to worry about  
> licensing at all
> ;-)

Wow. Cool.

>
> -- 
> regards
> Kenneth Gonsalves
> Associate
> NRC-FOSS
> http://nrcfosshelpline.in/web/
>
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Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-talk] Post tastsic questions of my own


On 5 Mar 2009, at 00:55, Frederik Ramm wrote:

> Steve,
>
> (Has someone told you that you're overly concerned about your Fake  
> self? He seems to make an appearance in every second post you write.)

I love him. I want to *be* him.

> SteveC wrote:
>> Over IM and email I've had some really positive replies. There are  
>> a  lot of you out there who personally responded that you liked my  
>> posts.
>
> "Lurkers support me in E-Mail!"
>
> I know how it feels only I seem to get the E-Mails of those who are  
> unhappy ;-) the tone of these E-Mails is usually: "I think the whole  
> process stinks but I am not with the project long enough to feel  
> entitled to say so publicly." - My answer is usually along the lines  
> "anyone is entitled to speak their mind so feel free to do so; yes  
> the process stinks but I think that it is worth trying to fix things  
> instead of rejecting the relicensing effort outright. Sometimes good  
> things are delivered in ugly wrapping".

/me nods

>> You don't like the crappy negative tone of a lot of people. You  
>> think  the license is a good step. You want to see my satanic  
>> portal. I have  to ask you why do you do this personally? I know  
>> the answer. You have  a secret and you want to keep it safe and  
>> warm and snuggly in your  duvet, away from these posts. It's called  
>> sanity. I know. It's hard.  But if you post here, and show the End  
>> Of The World crew that there  are opinions beyond we will all  
>> be better. Really.
>
> These mailing lists are for communication, for talking to each other  
> and finding solutions. I am not interested in "me too" postings from  
> people  who don't care enough to engage in discussion - from either  
> side of the argument. (Is there "either side"? Personally I feel  
> that I'm on all sides at the same time. Or on none of them,  
> depending on your point of view.) Someone who is unwilling to defend  
> and argue for his opinion is not a worthy addition to any kind of  
> debate. This is not a "whose fanboy are you" poll.
>
> And before you say that there is more mud-slinging than debate: We  
> had a lot of very sensible debate over on legal-talk; that would  
> have taken us even further had you or someone else from the  
> "licensing working group" participated in it rather than ignoring it.

agreed... but I wouldn't say we ignored it although I can appreciate  
thats how it might have looked.

>> My second question goes to those who live in the various countries   
>> that aren't bankrupt... oh I mean those that aren't in the UK. How  
>> is  the community there? Is it bad? Is it good? How can we help.  
>> What are  *you* doing to help? Are you stirring dissent? Are you  
>> trying to build  a consensus?
>
> My view of the community in Germany is that dissent stirs itself,  
> with the major themes being:
>
> (1) fear for loss of data because people will not agree to the  
> change - it seems to me that even more so than on the English- 
> language lists, Germans are so protective of the OSM they have  
> helped create that they'd rather keep a crappy and non-working  
> license than to have to delete data.

H I hope we can convince everybody that it will be much better  
than that.

> (2) unhappiness about lack of protection for Produced Works, envious/ 
> greedy arguments about possible commercial exploitation of same, and  
> unwillingness to accept interim database share-alike as a replacement

One of the things I thought of was Produced Works could drop in to CC- 
BY-SA. What do you think?

> (3) general unease about the process (feeling left out/rushed;  
> having been told in the past that the OSMF does not want to  
> influence the fate of the project, just operate servers and collect  
> money; generally not having had any say in the new license and a  
> feeling that is unlikely they will ever have a say because the  
> license is being designed by lawyers from another country in another  
> language etc.

You didn't mention BAN POTLATCH? Seriously though... I understand.  
Lets make it better.

> I'm generally defending the benefits of the new license, subject to  
> the caveats being discussed here; however it is my opinion that the  
> process how we got to where we are now has been wrong and if someone  
> seeks reassurance from me ("please tell me that they will listen to  
> our concerns and not try to rush everyone into accepting a new  
> license while important issues are unsolved, please tell me that  
> they won't do funny things behind closed doors, please tell me that  
> we will get a profound legal opinion before they go ahead, please  
> tell me that I won't wake up one morning to find an E-Mail in my  
> inbox saying agree to this license or go away") - then, from past  
> experience in this process, the only thing I can honestly say is: I  
> *hope* so too.

Well the process is all up for discussion, the plan on the wiki etc.  
The first thing we will do in the lic

Re: [OSM-talk] License to kill

2009-03-05 Thread Grant Slater

SteveC wrote:
>
>> A 'pure' OSM perspective should of course come from the OSMF lawyer 
>> and I hope you/the 'licensing group' will be able to explain some of 
>> the outstanding Use Cases to him so he can give an opinion. Is that 
>> going to be possible within the consultation phase?
>
> I don't see why not - Grant add to the agenda and lets discuss.

No problem, added to the agenda already yesterday.

COMMUNITY HELP... Could I ask some guys to please go through the list
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Use_Cases

And flag which one still require a response from the OSMF lawyer 
including those that require extra explanation to the lawyer.
Peter Miller has also suggested on the talk page that some items might 
be appropriate to merge.

Regards
 Grant

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Re: [OSM-talk] Post tastsic questions of my own


On 4 Mar 2009, at 22:27, Nic Roets wrote:

>
>
> My second question goes to those who live in the various countries
> that aren't bankrupt... oh I mean those that aren't in the UK. How is
> the community there? Is it bad? Is it good? How can we help. What are
>
> Just to give you an idea of how crazy the world economy has become :  
> Not too far from where I live we have holes in the ground, were we  
> used to dig up some yellow and gray stuff and sell it to you.

yeah I bought some yellow stuff in an ETF 5 or 6 months ago. Good  
choice.

> Lately you're not interested in the gray stuff [2] (Is the color  
> wrong ?). And you're paying us extra just to put the yellow stuff   
> back into another hole in the ground. [1]
>
> As for the community : Ed has finally caught up with us [3].
>
> [1] http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php? 
> fSectionId=563&fArticleId=4849212
> [2] 
> http://www.commodityonline.com/news/Platinum-Gold-price-differential-almost-zero-15558-3-1.html
> [3] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-za/2009-February/000382.html
>

Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-talk] licence plan - Question about supplying own data


On 4 Mar 2009, at 18:03, Frederik Ramm wrote:

> Hi,
>
> SteveC wrote:
>> One of the things I didn't mention in my long post an that most of  
>> you clearly don't understand is that a court takes *intent* in to  
>> account as guidence in any license dispute. So like case law you  
>> can spend all the time you like reading the letter of the license  
>> but if the intent was clearly elsewhere *it doesn't matter*.
>
> All the time you say that we mere humans should not talk legalese  
> but leave this to the lawyers.

No not really... I'm suggesting that you're intelligent and have great  
skills but those skills aren't intellectual property law, and its  
better that if a lawyer has a code question he asks you, and if you  
have a law question you ask them. Your time is way better spent that  
way.

> But if it were all about intent, then we could just write a document  
> in plain English and use that.

And there seems to be your misunderstanding of law. 'plain English'  
often just isn't, every word has special meanings which are open to  
interpretations you and I just don't know about.

> In fact I think that in many jurisdictions this would actually give  
> us the same level of "protection" than a longish "license" with the  
> added benefit that everybody can understand our intent, whereas -  
> proof is on odc-discuss where there are some people who read the  
> ODbL out of OSM context! - it seems that reading ODbL is not enough  
> to understand our intent.

Exactly. Reading the ODbL gives you one 30,000 ft viewpoint but for a  
full understanding you need to brake open your case of IP lawyers and  
ask them to look. As soon as you get to that level, its best to hand  
over the baton to them.

>>> That "feature" is something that was introduced without so much as a
>>> word from anyone between the April 2008 and the 0.9 drafts. If  
>>> this were
>>> intentional, then someone had to hang for trying to deceive the
>>> community.
>> You're doing it again - jumping to the conclusion that it was all  
>> Evil Jordan or Evil Steve.
>
> No. I am truly, honestly assuming that this is a blunder that nobody  
> noticed. The previous license draft said quite clearly that if you  
> publicly "use" a database, which included making a Produced Work (it  
> was called differently then but that doesn't matter) then you would  
> have to make the database available.
>
> The new version introduced the word "convey" instead of "use", which  
> is not a big deal, but then defined "convey" as "not applying to  
> making Produced Works".

My memory about this is that specific change is because of some recent  
case law which Clark picked up on. If you have a specific question  
(I'm not entirely sure what you're asking...) lets queue that up for  
legal? I think I know the issue and I thought it had been fixed.

> In doing so, the license went 180° - from forcing people to make  
> available a derived database on which they built Produced Works to  
> not forcing them to do so. All the time, proponents of the license  
> change (which, you might be surprised to see, include me), argued to  
> the hardcore share-alikers: "You don't get protection of Produced  
> Works but you get share-alike for interim databases which is much  
> more in line with what we want". This has been, and still is, a  
> fundamental point, an argument without I could not justify ODbL to  
> these people.
>
> It seems absolutely inconceivable that someone *knowingly* made such  
> a huge change and not even bothered to tell anyone. Even with my  
> mild degree of paranoia, it still seems absolutely inconceivable.
>
> That's why I write "if this were intentional, someone had to hang  
> for trying to deceive the community". If someone, anyone, really  
> thought "hey, I'll make this change and nobody will notice that this  
> will nicely drop database share-alike for improved data on which  
> Produced Works are built, so that I can, in the future, add my own  
> improvements, publish cool images, and never share my improvements";  
> if anyone really was that devious, that would be absolutely beyond  
> the pale and that person should not be allowed to say the words  
> "OpenStreetMap" or "community" ever again.
>
> But believe it or not, I don't think that there was such a secret  
> agenda on anyone's part. I think it simply has been overlooked. I  
> have just spent two weeks amid printed paper finalising the second  
> edition of our OSM book and I know perfectly well how easy it is to  
> change a meaning on page 3 by rewording something on page 1, and not  
> noticing it until the proofreader paints it red.
>
> The ODbL has been proofread, the problem has been painted red, and I  
> am sure it will be fixed. It *must* be fixed, because otherwise ODbL  
> is dead for OSM; you can claim that intent matters all you want, but  
> you will never be able to get a license past the Share-Alike  
> fraction that allows improvements to our data

Re: [OSM-talk] licence plan - Question about supplying own data


On 4 Mar 2009, at 23:44, 80n wrote:
> > If you were able to extract coordinates then this could be  
> regarded as
> > reverse engineering the Produced Work, in which case it's covered by
> > 4.7
> > There's that "substantial" caveat again though.
>
> Very unlikely, derived individual coordinates are facts. I've asked
> multiple lawyers about this personally.
>
> Are you saying that facts that are derived from a Produced Work are  
> not covered by the reverse engineering clause?
>
> If I derive the location of all the street corners of a city from a  
> rendered map then that is just a collection of facts and not a  
> reverse engineered recreation of the original database?  If so, it  
> doesn't seem like the reverse engineering clause is worth the paper  
> its written on.

Please consult your nearest IP lawyer, I'm going to refrain from  
providing legal opinion. We can queue this up for legal though if you  
want?

Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-talk] License to kill


On 5 Mar 2009, at 01:11, Peter Miller wrote:

>
> On 5 Mar 2009, at 00:29, SteveC wrote:
>>
>>
>>> For your interest my company's lawyer (acting for ITO World Ltd)  
>>> is hoping to have her response together in relation to the license  
>>> by the end of tomorrow. My company will review her comments and  
>>> hope to be able to make that document publicly available to the  
>>> community by the end of this week. She may also give opinion on  
>>> some Use Cases and Open Issues which could be useful.
>>
>> Great. Are those opinions in relation to ITO!s business or from the  
>> point of view purely of the use cases?
>
> They will be from ITO's business perspective and we will focus  
> mainly on Use Cases that matter to our business however we are in  
> many ways a 'typical' business as as such our advice may well be of  
> relevant to other businesses, especially ones using the same Use  
> Cases and particularly ones that operate in the UK.
>
> We will also look at whether the license works for the project as a  
> whole because we want that to work as well however we would  
> encourage other to also get legal opinion from there perspectives.  
> If they can share the advise with the OSM/ODbL community then so  
> much the better.

Cool

> A 'pure' OSM perspective should of course come from the OSMF lawyer  
> and I hope you/the 'licensing group' will be able to explain some of  
> the outstanding Use Cases to him so he can give an opinion. Is that  
> going to be possible within the consultation phase?

I don't see why not - Grant add to the agenda and lets discuss.

Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] License to kill


On 4 Mar 2009, at 23:24, 80n wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 12:48 AM, SteveC  wrote:
>
> On 4 Mar 2009, at 08:12, Gervase Markham wrote:
> >> So lets concentrate on that. Lets build a better process. Lets
> >> build a
> >> consensus.
> >
> > Absolutely! As long as you allow us the time to (i.e. slow down and
> > stop
> > trying to get it done by the end of March!), then I'm all for  
> that :-)
>
> Maybe I'm making a mistake but the end of March is entirely driven by
> Jordan and the license comment process not me.
>
> It's great that Jordan wants to get 1.0 of the license out by April  
> 1st, but that doesn't then require that OSM adopts on the same  
> timescale.  If it is published and it still doesn't do what's needed  
> then we just work towards 1.1
>
> We shouldn't let other people's timescales force our own decisions.   
> If more time is needed, and there is a lot of opinion that suggests  
> it is, if the current issues cannot be resolved by April 1 then of  
> course we have the option to give ourselves more time.


Sure but we can also build a space laser if we want to. You're taking  
the benefit side in to account but not the cost.

If we get 99% there with version 1.0 and version 2.0 takes the next  
two years then the cost benefit, to me, would suggest 1.0 as the  
better deal.

Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

On 5 Mar 2009, at 00:14, Nop wrote:

>
> Hi!
>
> SteveC schrieb:
>> We've not always done a great job of communicating for a variety of  
>> reasons but it was never with malice.
>
> But you have actually succeeded in making quite a number of people  
> suspect malice - and warn others about that.
>
> I do not agree, but I think it is a natural reaction, especially in  
> a community concerned about freedom:
> - You keep me in the dark and suprise me
> - You try to force my consent while I have had no chance to inform  
> myself

Yeah I'm still baffled by this one... where have I or the license  
working group tried to force any consent? I think we've been clear  
again and again that the whole process is up for discussion.

> => What are you hiding? What are you up to?

Sorry my satanic portal has just opened up again and 6 legged dinosaur- 
monkey-spiders have charged through screaming...

> I don't know you. And I had to google to check your affiliation with  
> OSMF. I have no reason to trust you. I have no reason to suspect you  
> of malice. But your repeated "Not our job" statements towards this  
> matter worries me a lot.

Yeah I'm just a total idiot and you shouldn't trust me because I want  
your brains. nom nom nom.

I only said it's not our job to back up what russ said about there  
being lots of things you don't know and we can't figure them all out  
for you.

> It is your initiative. It is your job. And if you don't do a better  
> job of including the community and breaking the news in an  
> acceptable way to everybody really quick, I fear desaster. You are  
> inviting hundreds of "No" decisions just because of bad information  
> policy.

You can keep blaming me personally for everything. I think when Eve  
ate that apple it was also my fault at least I think so.

Or you could help build the process now.

>>> This is the first time an ordinary OSM member had a chance to get  
>>> notice
>>> of the licence change and I bet you that there are 8 account  
>>> holders
>>> who still have no idea that anything is going on - so the process is
>>> just starting now. And we still have failed to give notice and
>>> understandable (translated) information to the majority of  
>>> participants.
>> I want to correct something here, there is this view of 100,000  
>> users needing consent. The number is in fact far smaller for people  
>> who ever made an edit (about 30% of the users). It's vastly smaller  
>> still for anyone who has edited anything significant. It's an  
>> easier problem than you might think, is what I'm saying. Far easier  
>> than convincing you I don't have a satanic portal in my basement.
>
> You know what you're saying? You don't care about 10 people who  
> are interested or want to contribute, you just care about the data  
> of the 8000 (?) who have substantially contributed?

No that's your mad interpretation of what I said. Mad.

> This is a community. This is about people. At least it should be.

Look I invented that, and I concentrated on the people and not the  
technology from the very beginning which is why this project succeeded  
where others didn't.

> Can't you understand why people do not trust you and suspect you are  
> just out to grab their work when you argue like this?

Of course I can, it's called paranoia. You all attack me when I  
haven't even been the one responsible for the communications, that was  
Mikel and Grant. You don't even spend the 2.6 seconds required to  
think that there is a working group and a board and they might be  
responsible as well. No no no, it's all steve and his satanic portal.  
Mwahahhaha.

Best

Steve

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!


On 4 Mar 2009, at 23:42, Nop wrote:

>
> Hi!
>
> SteveC schrieb:
>> To me this is similar to "ignorance of the law is no defence". The   
>> data, people and facts are out there and it's not our job to serve   
>> them up to you in the specific best way you want. We will help all  
>> we  can when you ask though.
>
> Thank your for bringing it down to this simple point.

np

> Actually, it *IS* your job.
>
> That simple. You want a change. You want their consent. Your job.

Well if you think about it you would want it too, right. Oh you're the  
guy who doesn't want to help.. I forgot.

Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!


On 4 Mar 2009, at 23:51, Nop wrote:
>>> 2. Provide translations of this in the major languages. Most people
>>> speak English to some degree, but some don't and something of this
>>> importance and with so much legalese involved does need to be in  
>>> your
>>> native language to be sure you understood it. Keep translations  
>>> current,
>>> also.
>> That would be great, when will you start organising them?
>
> Would have been the job of OSMF in a more diplomatic process.
>
> It seems you didn't get my point. A convincing attempt at informing  
> the community would have had to be organized by the OSMF, not by  
> volunteers stepping in to fix parts of a bungled job.

The OSMF *are* volunteers. I'll count you out from pitching in your  
help then!

> I can assure you that there is plenty of vitiriol in store for you  
> on the German forum for example that just doesn't make it here yet  
> due to the language barrier.

Is that just in general or because of the license process? BAN  
POTLATCH eh?

Best

Steve


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Re: [OSM-talk] What if ODBl 1.0 is superseeded by ODBl 2.0

2009-03-05 Thread Niccolo Rigacci

On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 02:05:36PM +0100, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> I am surprised that none of the respondents seem to have read the  
> license draft which clearly states that "a later version of this  
> license" is allowable, as is "a license compatible with this license".

I read the license, and after all I got that "feeling", but is 
not clear what makes another license "compatible".

I think this should go into the FAQ, in plain english.

Many people feeling pressed too much by the schedule, can relax a 
bit. Now we face the nightmare of a license change, but the new 
one can be better in this matter too.

-- 
Niccolo Rigacci
Firenze - Italy

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM Tile Layer in uDig?

2009-03-05 Thread Jukka Rahkonen

Iván Sánchez Ortega  sanchezortega.es> writes:

> 
> El Jueves, 5 de Marzo de 2009, Daniel A Carleton escribió:
> > Hello List,
> >
> > I'd like to use an OSM raster layer in uDig, and a WMS seems like a
> > convenient way to do it.  Is anyone doing something similar to this,
> > or using OSM tiles in uDig generally?  Would be grateful for any
> > advice.
> 
> There is a WMS-over-OSM implementation in the OSM SVN repository, and it 
> doesn't totally suck (you can read that as "it doesn't crash all the time" - 
> if it doesn't work in your environment, blame goes to me). 

If you can consider running your own WMS server and you can tolerate MapServer
then you can try the instructions from
http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/wiki/RenderingOsmData.  For WMS usage you can
stop after Creating the Mapfile section.  Mapserver homapage
http://mapserver.org shows an example of rendering.

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[OSM-talk] mapnik not accessing postgresql server

2009-03-05 Thread Kenneth Gonsalves

hi,
I had set up mapnik with mod_tile and openlayers and this worked fine on my 
local machine. I then set it up on my server - everything works, but mapnik 
does not attempt to access the postgresql server and only renders the 
boundaries. I have compiled mapnik --with-postgis, but nothing happens. The 
only difference between the 2 installs is that the local machine is fedora10 
and the server is lenny. It is not a case of failing silently as the 
postgresql logs show no attempt to access postgres. I even put a wrong 
username and password to test - but no go. Any suggestions?
-- 
regards
Kenneth Gonsalves
Associate
NRC-FOSS
http://nrcfosshelpline.in/web/

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Re: [OSM-talk] What if ODBl 1.0 is superseeded by ODBl 2.0

Hi,

Donald Allwright wrote:
> I would be very keen to take a leaf out of the GPL world here, and license 
> the data under
> "ODBL 1.0 or later".

I am surprised that none of the respondents seem to have read the 
license draft which clearly states that "a later version of this 
license" is allowable, as is "a license compatible with this license".

Bye
Frederik

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[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL: Click-Through required?

Hi,

a major issue that we have debated last year was whether or not
applying ODbL to OSM would require some sort of click-through. I believe
that this is one of the issues where anyone who is asked to vote yes or
no is entitled to know exactly where the OSMF stands on the issue.

To give a bit of background for potential newcomers; the idea is that in
such jurisdictions where there is no database law, the ODbL works as a
contract between the person offering and the person receiving the data,
where the person receiving the data affirms that they will adhere to
ODbL. Which, in turn, would mean that they may only pass the data on to
people also affirming their use of ODbL and so on.

This leads to two theoretical problems:

1. Is it sufficient to have a note saying "by using our data you agree
to ...", or do we need to have an explicit "click here to agree"? The
latter would be extremely tedious for some applications (e.g. mirroring
of planet files and so on). Even API read requests would require an
account and all that. Steve Coast suggests in

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License_FAQ#Will_this_change_how_people_access_OSM_data.3F

that: "... it is likely that anonymous download of the data via the API
will not be permitted as present. Anonymous download of data will still
be possible, but only via a licence acceptance click-through on the OSM
website. Access to the planet files will receive similar treatment and
future planet files will contain details of the licence.", however this
statement is 13 months old and may or may not still be current.

I raised the same issue on

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Open_Issues#What_happens_in_places_where_there_is_no_database_directive.3F

and Mike Collinson commented that:

"... I think that the assumption is that the contract is implicit - you
do stuff with the data, you accept the contract.", adding that "the cure
for breach of a contractual situation is typically how much money did
the Licensor lose (open Licensor = none)".

My personal thinking is that a fully click-trough is near impossible to
implement and would pose a major inconvenience at the very least (no
"data layer" without first registering and agreeing to the license...),
and I very much like Mike's reading which would amount to us putting
some tag in our XML and be done with it.

I would, however, hope that OSMF issue a statement that either says "we
will request all users to agree to the license and we will only make
data available to those who agree", or says "we will ask everybody to
install proper tags and that's it".

2. If the chain is broken (by not displaying the click-wrap or by
removing the tag or so), then while the violator has clearly
done wrong and can be sued, any user "downstream" of him can legally use
the data without restrictions, because he has not entered a contract.

This is probably something that cannot be helped in either case, but it
is something that needs to be assessed and documented. What will we do
if this happens? How likely is it to happen? Will it cause damage to the
project?

Bye
Frederik

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Re: [OSM-talk] Post tastsic questions of my own

2009-03-05 Thread Gustav Foseid

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 3:07 AM, SteveC  wrote:

> Over IM and email I've had some really positive replies. There are a
> lot of you out there who personally responded that you liked my posts.
> You don't like the crappy negative tone of a lot of people.

> You think
> the license is a good step. You want to see my satanic portal. I have
> to ask you why do you do this personally? I know the answer. You have
> a secret and you want to keep it safe and warm and snuggly in your
> duvet, away from these posts. It's called sanity. I know. It's hard.
> But if you post here, and show the End Of The World crew that there
> are opinions beyond we will all be better. Really. All of you who
> have IM'd me or emailed with your kind words, jump in here and keep at
> it. We'll build a better world with unicorns and water that runs uphill.

I have seen enough of you postst to feel that you have contributed to the
negative tone. But can we leave the barking about who is the most negative
person on the list aside for a few days?

> My second question goes to those who live in the various countries
> that aren't bankrupt... oh I mean those that aren't in the UK.

Would Norway count?

> How is
> the community there? Is it bad? Is it good?

Somewhere in between, I would say.

> How can we help. What are
> *you* doing to help?

I have informed of the process, and think most people interested are on the
international mailing list. The response seems positive.

> Are you stirring dissent? Are you trying to build
> a consensus?

I have provided my view, that the idea behind the license is better than the
current CC-BY-SA, but that some legal aspects needs to be sorted out. We
have one person from a major Norwegian provider of online maps on the list.
He seems to have the same view as "the other Steve, that a change is eagerly
anticipated by traditional cartographers.

> Do you think you're cool enough to fork or do you want to
> build something better? Because we love you.

Please... Could you, in addition to asking others to be more positive in
their communication, live up to that yourself.

 - Gustav
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Re: [OSM-talk] What if ODBl 1.0 is superseeded by ODBl 2.0

2009-03-05 Thread Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Donald Allwright
 wrote:
> I would be very keen to take a leaf out of the GPL world here, and license
> the data under
> "ODBL 1.0 or later". That means if and when 2.0 comes out (which it surely
> will) the data are automatically
> covered by the new version. When 2.0 does come out, that changes to "ODBL
> 2.0 or later" for all new data
> added to the project after that date. As long as we trust the body
> responsible for creating the ODBL licence to
> create future versions in keeping with the aims of the licence that we
> currently understand, that should be
> no problem.

I don't feel very confident handing the maintainers of the ODBL a
blank cheque for changing the terms under which my works are licensed
at a later date via a "or later" clause given the history of its
revision process.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread Andy Allan

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Andy Allan wrote:
>>
>> 1) Make the plan and the draft public. Ask for feedback.
>> 2) Wait for feedback to be taken into account and expect/hope for a
>> final version of the ODbL
>> 3) See if the OSMF board approves
>> 4) See if OSMF members like what results
>
> The word "final" should probably be struck out here because it has kind of
> "gun to your head" ring to it: Take this license or be stuck with CC-BY-SA
> forever.
>
> Instead, if either the OSMF board, or the members, are unhappy with the
> license (which is quite likely given that only ONE week is scheduled for
> phase 2 and I can safely say that the status quo would not pass a vote),
> then we need a new iteration; what is your "final" version then becomes the
> draft, and back to phase 1.
>
> And this must be made clear when the vote is taken; that this is not a vote
> about "ODbL now or CC-BY-SA forever" but a vote about "ODbL or wait for
> revisions".

Absolutely. I meant final as in non-draft - bad choice of words on my behalf.

Like saying when we have a "final" version of API 0.6 ;-)

Cheers,
Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] What if ODBl 1.0 is superseeded by ODBl 2.0

2009-03-05 Thread Donald Allwright

>> I would be very keen to take a leaf out of the GPL world here, and
>license
>> the data under
>> "ODBL 1.0 or later". That means if and when 2.0 comes out (which it
>surely
>> will) the data are automatically
>> covered by the new version. When 2.0 does come out, that changes to "ODBL
>> 2.0 or later" for all new data 
>
>I agree completely.
>If we don't do this we will have this mess again in a 
>few years.

Or more likely, a few months with ODBL 1.1, which fixes a use case that no-one 
thought of. With the best will in the world, it's not going to be perfect first 
time round, and just as GPLv3 made late changes as a result of an agreement 
between Microsoft and Novell, there could be a legal case somewhere in the 
world which highlights the need for a change.

Donald



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[OSM-legal-talk] New Database Right Exception

2009-03-05 Thread Rob Myers

FYI :

"The EU's Database Directive does not have an exemption for people
with disabilities in the way that the Copyright Directive and
copyright laws have. The Commission asked whether a new exemption in
that Directive should be created. The Government said it should.

"Subject to evaluation of the impact of making such an amendment, it
would seem appropriate to ensure that the same conditions apply to an
exception including databases as apply to the current exemption
dealing with other works," it said."

http://www.out-law.com//default.aspx?page=9838

- Rob.

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Re: [OSM-talk] What if ODBl 1.0 is superseeded by ODBl 2.0

2009-03-05 Thread marcus.wolschon

On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 03:33:45 -0800 (PST), Donald Allwright
 wrote:

> I would be very keen to take a leaf out of the GPL world here, and
license
> the data under
> "ODBL 1.0 or later". That means if and when 2.0 comes out (which it
surely
> will) the data are automatically
> covered by the new version. When 2.0 does come out, that changes to "ODBL
> 2.0 or later" for all new data 

I agree completely.
If we don't do this we will have this mess again in a 
few years.


Marcus

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

Hi,

Andy Allan wrote:
> 1) Make the plan and the draft public. Ask for feedback.
> 2) Wait for feedback to be taken into account and expect/hope for a
> final version of the ODbL
> 3) See if the OSMF board approves
> 4) See if OSMF members like what results

The word "final" should probably be struck out here because it has kind 
of "gun to your head" ring to it: Take this license or be stuck with 
CC-BY-SA forever.

Instead, if either the OSMF board, or the members, are unhappy with the 
license (which is quite likely given that only ONE week is scheduled for 
phase 2 and I can safely say that the status quo would not pass a vote), 
then we need a new iteration; what is your "final" version then becomes 
the draft, and back to phase 1.

And this must be made clear when the vote is taken; that this is not a 
vote about "ODbL now or CC-BY-SA forever" but a vote about "ODbL or wait 
for revisions".

Bye
Frederik

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Re: [OSM-talk] What if ODBl 1.0 is superseeded by ODBl 2.0

2009-03-05 Thread Donald Allwright

>May be the FAQ should point out what could be the trouble to 
>switch from ODBL 1.0 to ODBl 2.0, just in case some oversight 
>become evident in the future.

I would be very keen to take a leaf out of the GPL world here, and license the 
data under
"ODBL 1.0 or later". That means if and when 2.0 comes out (which it surely 
will) the data are automatically
covered by the new version. When 2.0 does come out, that changes to "ODBL 2.0 
or later" for all new data 
added to the project after that date. As long as we trust the body responsible 
for creating the ODBL licence to
create future versions in keeping with the aims of the licence that we 
currently understand, that should be
no problem.

Cheers,
Donald



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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM Tile Layer in uDig?

2009-03-05 Thread Iván Sánchez Ortega

El Jueves, 5 de Marzo de 2009, Daniel A Carleton escribió:
> Hello List,
>
> I'd like to use an OSM raster layer in uDig, and a WMS seems like a
> convenient way to do it.  Is anyone doing something similar to this,
> or using OSM tiles in uDig generally?  Would be grateful for any
> advice.

There is a WMS-over-OSM implementation in the OSM SVN repository, and it 
doesn't totally suck (you can read that as "it doesn't crash all the time" - 
if it doesn't work in your environment, blame goes to me). 

Cheers,
-- 
--
Iván Sánchez Ortega 

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[OSM-talk] What if ODBl 1.0 is superseeded by ODBl 2.0

2009-03-05 Thread Niccolo Rigacci

We are discussing about the trouble of switching from CCBYSA to 
ODBl 1.0. Many people fear the short time given to review this 
new license,

May be the FAQ should point out what could be the trouble to 
switch from ODBL 1.0 to ODBl 2.0, just in case some oversight 
become evident in the future.

-- 
Niccolo Rigacci
Firenze - Italy

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread Andy Allan

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 12:40 AM, MP  wrote:
>> Yes. At least when you expect 10 people to go along and the issue
>> has the potential to break OSM apart, it would not be a bad idea to send
>> monthly information about the state of things.
>
> Hmm ... perhaps sometimes it would be good to mass-email all members
> when it is about changes with possibly devastating (mass deletion)
> effect. Not everybody reads various blogs or parts of wiki around OSM,
> but almost everybody reads their email.

Hang on, here's something which has been misunderstood. There's a good
reason that we haven't emailed all 100,000 people yet. We're not sure
whether the OSMF endorses the new license, which is itself still in a
draft. If you look at the license plan (
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Implementation_Plan
) you'll see it comes in the following stages:

1) Make the plan and the draft public. Ask for feedback.
2) Wait for feedback to be taken into account and expect/hope for a
final version of the ODbL
3) See if the OSMF board approves
4) See if OSMF members like what results
5) If they do, then start asking the rest of the community

*So we're at point 1*. We've always assumed that if you're the kind of
person who wants to be involved in drafting licenses, reviewing
incomplete licenses and so on you'll get involved. Most people
probably don't care. That's why legal-talk subscriptions aren't
compulsory in order to use the API.

If you feel left out of stage 3, then maybe you should become a member
of the OSMF. That's what it's there for. But again, not everyone is
interested in the running of the project, doing behind the scenes
stuff, holding the OSMF Board to account etc. Which is why OSMF
membership isn't compulsory either.

There's all chances that the OSMF members won't vote for the license,
in which case it won't be put to the community at all Or maybe they
will. The way the plan is seems to me a sensible staged approach of
involvment - first the Board, then the Members, then the community at
large. It needs to get through all three stages to work, and if any
group disapproves, it stops. And we involve the smallest group first,
then a bigger, then the biggest.

Now because things are being done publicly, lots of people who are
only interested in stage 5 think that we've skipped a few stages.
Maybe we've found some people who want to be invovled in stage 1 who
didn't realise until now that they did. Good. It's nice to have more
people interested.

Cheers,
Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] It's all too fast...

2009-03-05 Thread Dair Grant

graham wrote:

> Please go with Gervase's suggested timetable instead. And build in some extra
> process for including results of discussion by non-english-speaking countries.

I know this is an unpopular view, but I disagree.

I rather we had an ODbL 1.0 in as short a time as possible, so that we could
look at it and decide if it is, or is not, what we want.

Disclaimer: I don't have any special insight into the licence process, would
have liked more feedback as it developed, and think (perhaps incorrectly)
that the point of having an OSMF is to inform us of things like this.

People have been talking about the licence issue for years (literally; there
was an hour-long panel about it at SOTM 2007), and we have nothing to show
for it other than a large number of "I'm not a lawyer, but..." threads.

We know there are issues with the current licence, and there will be issues
with ODbL 1.0 as well.

But having that in front of us, in a final form, gives us a choice: is this
suitable for what we want, or not?

In a perfect world we would know exactly what we want, the licence would be
drafted accordingly, and 1.0 could be adopted from day one. But we don't
know exactly what we want, and some of us want different things.

There's some overlap of course; the 1.0 needs to have some grounding in our
overall goal(s), but IMO two years of talking about a new licence needs to
come to a conclusion - or we should stop pretending that it ever will.

I would be happy to have a bad 1.0 out sooner which was rejected by OSM
(perhaps accepted by some other community, who knows), than a perfect 1.0
which never arrived.

Finalising a license and adopting it are two separate things - no matter
what timetable you pick for the former, the latter will take longer (since
someone will pop up and say "wait, we're doing what now?!?").

Even if we reject 1.0, we can still tackle problems like contacting people,
identifying how much data we'd need to redo if we take a strict line and say
data doesn't carry forward without explicit consent, etc.

-dair
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Re: [OSM-talk] License plan - what data would need deleting

2009-03-05 Thread Ed Avis

Simon Ward  bleah.co.uk> writes:

>Are you responding to my mail, or one earlier in the thread?  I stated
>that everything should be reverted to before each incompatible change.

I wanted to make the general point that while technically we can devise rules
for deciding what changes are compatible and incompatible, there is a certain
maximum level of complexity, and rules that generate long discussions on the
mailing list are probably too complex to stand up in court.  (Taking a
pessimistic view.)

-- 
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Re: [OSM-talk] Rights of way again

2009-03-05 Thread Ed Avis

Mike Harris  googlemail.com> writes:

[private roads]

>How about using highway=service (and even including service=driveway) for
>some of these as these are existing documented tags?

Yes, I sometimes use service and sometimes track.  In general if it's a dead-end
path to a set of garages I call it a 'track', while a well-maintained road that
just happens to be private is 'service'.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Derived coordinates are facts (was: Re: Question about supplying own data)

2009-03-05 Thread Lars Aronsson

Frederik Ramm wrote:

> We have until now been reluctant to import OA data because many 
> people in OSM felt that these might be "tainted",

It is important that OSM can continue to function and be useful in 
Wikipedia and other places. A somewhat paranoid policy is not all 
bad.

At the same time, it's important that we can experiment to find 
the limits of copyright. How can we find out if e.g. OA data can 
be legally reused and in what ways? What are the risks and how can 
we test them?  Perhaps we need to find ways outside of OSM for 
such experimentation? A copyright lab as a separate entity?

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Re: [OSM-talk] Post tastsic questions of my own

2009-03-05 Thread Edoardo 'Yossef' Marascalchi

SteveC wrote:
> are opinions beyond we will all be better. Really. All of you who  
> have IM'd me or emailed with your kind words, jump in here and keep at  
> it. We'll build a better world with unicorns and water that runs uphill.
>
>   
I replied you privately just because I used a style I usually don't 
use.. but.. i  want to thank you for your email here again! :D
I liked your email, the coders-lawyers parallel and the general message 
it sent.
> My second question goes to those who live in the various countries  
> that aren't bankrupt... oh I mean those that aren't in the UK. How is  
> the community there? Is it bad? Is it good? How can we help. What are  
> *you* doing to help? Are you stirring dissent? Are you trying to build  
> a consensus? Do you think you're cool enough to fork or do you want to  
> build something better? Because we love you. You are bridging a divide  
> between the foundation, the evil british empire, and all those poor  
> non-english speaking souls. Really, you do a lot of work to  
> communicate between lists what's going on and if you only report the  
> bad stuff then you're responsible for it.. But I don't think you are,  
> are you? Because it's much better if we build a consensus and a happy  
> coexistence of friends toward a free, open, libre, stunning,  
> beautiful, fantastic map of the world.
>   
You know, we (as italian) are a little bit melodrammatic :D
We thought some "evil" derive was  acting in the licence writing but i 
read the draft and i don't found any evillness (as INAL).
So, now  I will try to do know is to ask italian OSM community to read 
and comment the draft...

Edoardo

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ICT Consultant

Tel +39.347.008.00.02
website: http://www.edoardomarascalchi.it
skype: My status  


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Re: [OSM-talk] Fwd: It's all too fast...

2009-03-05 Thread graham

Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:

> 
> I really don't want to get into a long discussion about the licence,
> but what I'm really missing is a rationale document, going through
> each paragraph explaining why it says what it says. Because there are
> things in there that I don't understand why they're there.

Me too.
> 
> As an aside, Can we get something into the user accounts that allows
> people to tick a box saying they agree to some kind of licence change.
> ISTM the easiest way to finish the discussion about deleted data is to
> get some actual figures as to how much of a problem it is. If it turns
> out 99.8% of people agree then the question becomes moot.
> 

I don't think this will necessarily help, as it doesn't give you the 
reasons people might not agree. In my case, I feel I am being told 
'agree to this new license which we haven't fully explained by this 
deadline or we will delete your data'. If that really is the case, I 
would not agree to the change - not because I think it is a bad license, 
which I don't know, but because I don't like the process.

Graham

> Have a nice day,

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM license change: A license to kill? -> How to make a nightmare come true!

2009-03-05 Thread Dair Grant

Nop wrote:

>> I want to correct something here, there is this view of 100,000 users
>> needing consent. The number is in fact far smaller for people who ever
>> made an edit (about 30% of the users). It's vastly smaller still for
>> anyone who has edited anything significant. It's an easier problem than
>> you might think, is what I'm saying. Far easier than convincing you I
>> don't have a satanic portal in my basement.
> 
> You know what you're saying? You don't care about 10 people who are
> interested or want to contribute, you just care about the data of the
> 8000 (?) who have substantially contributed?

That's not what he is saying at all.

Nobody is planning to ditch contributions below some threshold for the sake
of it, however things should not stall simply because one person who's
contributed one post-box two years ago can't be contacted any more.

All he's saying is that although we might have 100K registered users, only
30K of them have made an edits whatsoever.

Looking at the stats page, only about 8K are making edits each month (a
different 8K each month, sure).

This paper (http://tinyurl.com/5p2w65) looked at contributors in the UK, and
found that of the 1100 users in their sample some 92 of them had contributed
80% of the data (or 0.08% - about 8K again, a nice coincidence).

> This is a community. This is about people. At least it should be.
> 
> Can't you understand why people do not trust you and suspect you are
> just out to grab their work when you argue like this?

Nobody is trying to grab anyone's work. Doing so would take far less effort.

But a licence change is effectively like an (internal) fork, and we may find
that some people disagree so strongly that their contributions can't be
carried forward.

Or simply that we decide to be very cautious, and feel we can't take forward
data we can't be 100% sure about.

It's sensible to understand just what impact that would have, since we are
going to lose some data no matter what (some contributors are now dead;
we're not going to contact their relatives, so we either unilaterally put
their data under a new licence or we remove it).

> Even though I am in favour of the licence itself, this way of thinking
> is unacceptable to me.

So what are you doing to help?

-dair
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Re: [OSM-talk] License plan

2009-03-05 Thread Dave Stubbs

2009/3/5 SteveC :
>
> On 27 Feb 2009, at 05:04, Ben Laenen wrote:
>
>> It looks like we finally got some kind of "License plan" for the step
>> towards the new license, so everyone check
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Implementation_Plan
>>
>> Let me start with the obvious questions first:
>>
>>
>>
>> * why don't you split between the votes whether you like license X and
>> the question whether you're allowing the change of license on your
>> data?
>>
>> After all, I want to have an idea *how much* of the data will still be
>> there after the second vote. If it turns out that any data from
>> someone
>> who gave his approval would be deleted, then count me as no vote.
>
> so vote method is an interesting constraint... but I think we're being
> really hardcore in making sure that everyone who added data has to
> agree or we reset the process back to zero.
>
>> * I still have no response to the question what would happen with my
>> data if it's derived from someone who doesn't give it's approval for a
>> license change.
>
> My view, personally, is that it should be dropped. But y'know I just
> don't think it will happen like that. If we build a positive process
> and bring people with us then we'll get the majority of the people
> along. We will lose small bits of data but thats ok, we have fantastic
> volunteer community to fix those edges, we'll be in shape in no time.
>
>> And how are you going to check that anyway? You can do lots of things
>> with CC-BY-SA data (copying, splitting, merging) where it's impossible
>> to
>
> Well it's all in the database... every single edit (oh and the dump of
> the segments stuff). Because one day, about 4.5 years ago I knew it
> would be needed and designed it in. No need to thank me. No. Really.
>

I think he's referring to the more complex derivatives (such as
splitting a way) which are clearly logically derived but have no
obvious connection in our data model (splitting creates a new way with
no history, as well as leaving the original way in place but
truncated). But this is only an issue if you're taking the literal
unwind objects only approach and still regard such artefacts as in any
way significant. Mostly nodes will get in the way anyway and force you
to do some kind of cascade delete, but there are still more than a few
ways these bits and bobs will leak through.


>> My understanding is for example that if you split a way, there's not a
>> single connection between the two parts of the way telling that one
>> derived from the other.
>
> I can't comment on what potlatch does to my beautiful database.
>

You can however comment on your crappy data model that doesn't allow
forking an object to share a common history :-)

Dave

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Re: [OSM-talk] Map tag in Wikipedia

2009-03-05 Thread Lars Aronsson

Ed Loach wrote:

> Not quite what you're after, but there is also 
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_Map_MediaWiki_Extension
> which is very similar to map, but allows viewers to drag and zoom.

Ah, this  tag is even better than the static  tag.

This map features a "reset" button, to jump back to the 
coordinates stored in the article. But if I want to change the 
coordinates stored in the article, can I get the new values from 
the pan-and-zoom map?  Perhaps through a "save" button next to the 
reset button?

-- 
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  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Re: [OSM-talk] It's all too fast...

2009-03-05 Thread graham

Andy Allan wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Gervase Markham  wrote:
>> The GPLv3 public revision process was 18 months in multiple phases, and
>> it was based on an existing licence. We are trying to analyse a
>> completely new and untested one and get it to a final version in 1 month.
> 
> We've been talking about the ODbL for a lng time now, way more
> than 18 months. It's not completely new. The previous draft was dated
> April 2008. If you're new to the discussions, then welcome, but don't
> make like the ODbL has never been seen before and that we're trying to
> do everything in 1 month.
> 

No, it's absolutely too fast. It's been discussed for a long time - but 
nearly entirely behind closed doors, with almost nothing concrete to see 
about progress on the legal mailing list (I'm not a subscriber, but have 
kept looking at the archives to check on what's happening - which most 
of the time has seemed to be 'Jordan's looking at it'). Gervase is 
entirely right.

I feel steamrollered, and don't appreciate it. The process seems 
designed to exaggerate a tendency to 'them and us' rather than community.

Please go with Gervase's suggested timetable instead. And build in some 
extra process for including results of discussion by 
non-english-speaking countries.

Graham

> Cheers,
> Andy
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Re: [OSM-talk] licence plan - Question about supplying own data

2009-03-05 Thread Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists)

Peter Miller wrote:
>Sent: 04 March 2009 5:04 PM
>To: jamicu...@gmail.com
>Cc: OSM
>Subject: [OSM-talk] licence plan - Question about supplying own data
>
>
>   *   (extreme example?) A group of 8 year old kids spend a day in
a
>local park mapping out locations where they find butterflies. They map this
>information using an OSM map and stick a copy on their local parks
>noticeboard. Surely they shouldn't be made to make this data available to
>OSM? Its not worth the bother for them (or OSM)
>
>   *   A wildlife group wishes to map the location of endangered
>species. Lacking money, OSM seems like a good resource, but they can not
>supply the data and therefore the location of protected species to OSM. So
>they can not use OSM and have to spend money on another map?
>
>Thanks for those. Great examples. I have added them to the Use Cases page.
>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Use_Cases
>

One thing we should not loose sight of in this process is what OSM is
collecting, and thus the limit of what we might wish to see contributed
back. The locations of butterflies and endangered species are examples of
transient data and some might argue it's not therefore something we would
want in OSM anyway. Limiting the applicability of the licence to relevant
data is not something I've personally thought about before, but it might
need considering if it has not been thus far.

Cheers

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] License to kill

2009-03-05 Thread Peter Miller

On 5 Mar 2009, at 00:29, SteveC wrote:
>
>
>> For your interest my company's lawyer (acting for ITO World Ltd) is  
>> hoping to have her response together in relation to the license by  
>> the end of tomorrow. My company will review her comments and hope  
>> to be able to make that document publicly available to the  
>> community by the end of this week. She may also give opinion on  
>> some Use Cases and Open Issues which could be useful.
>
> Great. Are those opinions in relation to ITO!s business or from the  
> point of view purely of the use cases?

They will be from ITO's business perspective and we will focus mainly  
on Use Cases that matter to our business however we are in many ways a  
'typical' business as as such our advice may well be of relevant to  
other businesses, especially ones using the same Use Cases and  
particularly ones that operate in the UK.

We will also look at whether the license works for the project as a  
whole because we want that to work as well however we would encourage  
other to also get legal opinion from there perspectives. If they can  
share the advise with the OSM/ODbL community then so much the better.

A 'pure' OSM perspective should of course come from the OSMF lawyer  
and I hope you/the 'licensing group' will be able to explain some of  
the outstanding Use Cases to him so he can give an opinion. Is that  
going to be possible within the consultation phase?

Regards,

Peter

>
>
> Best
>
> Steve
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] Front page design and SEO

Hi,

Tom Hughes wrote:
> I'm not sure delegating to all sort of different servers is the best way 
> to implement such a thing for lots of reasons. We just need the master 
> stylesheet to be able to take location into account when rendering.

That's how Google does it of course and it is, issues of scale aside, 
the easy choice. (And yes their motorway style changes, slightly, at 
many borders e.g. between Germany and France or Austria; maybe that's to 
denote toll motorways though and not a specifc national style.)

> Aside from anything else if you did it by delegation the style could 
> only change on the edge of a tile.

No; if done cleverly, national servers could produce half transparent 
tiles at the borders. I know it would be quite a feat to set up 
something like this, and every time you view a map of Europe then half 
the tiles would be missing because the Czech or Austrian or Hungarian or 
German server had a hiccup at that moment and so on. But it would be a 
really cool thing to have and help us get away from ugly centralism. We 
work and map and meet regionally; why not champion an architecture that 
actually takes this into account.

Could make a nice Google SoC project and/or even attract EU funding 
under some kind of "unity in diversity" programme.

I'm not suggesting to take away your holy central tile rendering; I'm 
sure that will always be needed to be practical. But an extra project on 
extra hardware with distributed tiles and nationally or even regionally 
decided styles... would be nice.

Bye
Frederik

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Re: [OSM-talk] Post tastsic questions of my own