Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
2010/10/2 Serge Wroclawski emac...@gmail.com On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 8:45 PM, Dave F. dave...@madasafish.com wrote: I think such a project would fail, and here are my reasons why: Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts. John Woodenhttp://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/johnwooden384233.html Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. Albert Einsteinhttp://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins122232.html ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
On 02/10/2010 05:51, Brendan Morley wrote: I actually investigated the use of public domain principles - however Australian copyright law does not allow it. The best we can do is a CC BY with zero attribution. If there's anyone out there who can let me know why zero attribution is not a good enough substitute for public domain, I'd like to get in contact with you. I'm not a lawer, but I think in the French law the moral fatherhood (paernité morale) can't be removed. So, zero attribution can't be a ggod solution for France. (apologies to Brendan for the bad posting on his mailbox) -- FrViPofm ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Vincent Pottier vpott...@gmail.com wrote: On 02/10/2010 05:51, Brendan Morley wrote: I actually investigated the use of public domain principles - however Australian copyright law does not allow it. The best we can do is a CC BY with zero attribution. If there's anyone out there who can let me know why zero attribution is not a good enough substitute for public domain, I'd like to get in contact with you. I'm not a lawer, but I think in the French law the moral fatherhood (paernité morale) can't be removed. So, zero attribution can't be a ggod solution for France. I am also not a lawyer, but I think some of these problems can be solved by a little bit of legal structuring. The foundation can ask the contributors to collect and process the data in return for some token reward, like a little bit of CPU time. Then the contributors will never have ownership of the data. You can even go a step further: If one of the governments are interested in getting directly involved, the terms and conditions of the website can say that that government is asking you to collect the data and process the data for some token reward. Then that government can make it PD. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
On Oct 2, 2010, at 5:03 AM, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote: Hi, On 10/02/2010 02:45 AM, Dave F. wrote: With the various forks that could/are taking place within OSM I'm curious if there are any other examples? Wikipedia has a catalogue of forks, unfortunately mixed with mirrors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks (I particularly like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/Mno#The_Mcfly _Network.) There *must* have been some forking action when Wikipedia changed their license from GFDL to CC-BY-SA I'm sure but I cannot find documentation on that. No fork that I know of due to license change, at least nothing serious that I heard about. In 2002, the Spanish Wikipedia forked and people went to the other project. The fork had to do with differences of project policies not license, the fork died few years later. Spanish Wikipedia grew more slowly as a result There's also citizendium, not really a fork at all but different and unsuccessful way of having articles reviewed and vetted. There is some debate about licenses among some of our more prolific and talented photographers. The GFDL license gives photographers more opportunity to make some $$ from their works as some book publishers rather not adhere to GFDL and don't mind paying for use of a good photograph found on Wikipedia. Katie Bye Frederik ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
wikia.com is an example of a wiki fork project. and it looks to be doing fine :) I like it as it hosts my acrosscanadatrails.wikia.com website. Its outside of wikipeda, and it's facebook integrated. wikimapia is also a fork project, and it's doing great. It has a function and surves a purpose. and as Brendan mentioned. The 'Average User will always be the average user' :) so it's up to us to make a great place for people to have something that keeps people interested, and serves a function. The entire Geospatial-everything Community as a whole is BIG and there certainly is room for many maps, of many kinds. ... and they all are good, and they all serve their unique purpose. cheers, sam On 10/2/10, Katie Filbert filbe...@gmail.com wrote: On Oct 2, 2010, at 5:03 AM, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote: Hi, On 10/02/2010 02:45 AM, Dave F. wrote: With the various forks that could/are taking place within OSM I'm curious if there are any other examples? Wikipedia has a catalogue of forks, unfortunately mixed with mirrors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks (I particularly like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/Mno#The_Mcfly _Network.) There *must* have been some forking action when Wikipedia changed their license from GFDL to CC-BY-SA I'm sure but I cannot find documentation on that. No fork that I know of due to license change, at least nothing serious that I heard about. In 2002, the Spanish Wikipedia forked and people went to the other project. The fork had to do with differences of project policies not license, the fork died few years later. Spanish Wikipedia grew more slowly as a result There's also citizendium, not really a fork at all but different and unsuccessful way of having articles reviewed and vetted. There is some debate about licenses among some of our more prolific and talented photographers. The GFDL license gives photographers more opportunity to make some $$ from their works as some book publishers rather not adhere to GFDL and don't mind paying for use of a good photograph found on Wikipedia. Katie Bye Frederik ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk -- Twitter: @Acrosscanada Blogs: http://acrosscanadatrails.posterous.com/ http://Acrosscanadatrails.blogspot.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sam.vekemans Skype: samvekemans IRC: irc://irc.oftc.net #osm-ca Canadian OSM channel (an open chat room) @Acrosscanadatrails ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
Le 02/10/10 09:59, Vincent Pottier a écrit : I'm not a lawer, but I think in the French law the moral fatherhood (paernité morale) can't be removed. So, zero attribution can't be a ggod solution for France. But, moral rights take not to change anyhing in the oeuvre without the rights owner's consent. I can't see how he could stand for that, after his work has been modified by some others. How collaborate for designing a changing map and claim for integrity of one's work? Christian Ex-librarian ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
On 02/10/2010 10:03, Frederik Ramm wrote: Hi, On 10/02/2010 02:45 AM, Dave F. wrote: With the various forks that could/are taking place within OSM I'm curious if there are any other examples? Wikipedia has a catalogue of forks, unfortunately mixed with mirrors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks (I particularly like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/Mno#The_Mcfly_Network.) Hi How many of these are actual forks? Apart from getting a 404 for your example, it lists it as a copy rather than a fork. Some (Wikimapia/wikia) are just inspired by Wikipedia appears to use wiki just to jump on the trendy bandwagon. Citizendium appears to be a competitor but didn't use Wikipedia's database. Are there any true forks that split due to principles that used the whole, same database? Cheers Dave f. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 1:45 AM, Dave F. dave...@madasafish.com wrote: Hi With the various forks that could/are taking place within OSM I'm curious if there are any other examples? I think it's wrong to think of these projects as forks in the same way as traditional software project forks. Certainly fosm.org holds the same values as OSM[1] and is looking hard at how to keep it's content as compatable and interoperable with OSM as possible[2]. I know there will be people who will want to contribute, at times, to both FOSM and OSM. If we can build the right tools we hope they'll be able to update both sites simultaneously. We've also considered deeply how to make sure that the content is interoperable[3], so that for those people who can use both CC-BY-SA licensed data and ODbL licensed data, they can more easily mix and merge data from separate OSMish sources. I think it's much more enlightened to think of these projects as members of the same family that fulfil different needs. In this context FOSM meets the needs of those people who do not subscribe to ODbL and it provides a place for imports that are not ODbL compatible. 80n [1] Apart from the license obviously. [2] More discussion here: http://groups.google.com/group/osm-fork/browse_thread/thread/1deaa830385c6fdf# [3] For example, by discouraging the divergence of tagging schemes. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org writes: There *must* have been some forking action when Wikipedia changed their license from GFDL to CC-BY-SA I'm sure but I cannot find documentation on that. I don't believe there was; Wikipedia had a vote of contributors on whether to change the licence, and because of some helpful licence changes by the FSF, there was no loss of data. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 7:46 PM, Katie Filbert filbe...@gmail.com wrote: In 2002, the Spanish Wikipedia forked and people went to the other project. The fork had to do with differences of project policies not license, the fork died few years later. Spanish Wikipedia grew more slowly as a result This is an important case study. The fork was basically triggered by the possibility of future advertising on Wikipedia not being ruled out. No plans had been made, and as we have seen, no advertising on Wikipedia ever happened. Yet the fear was enough to make a sizeable chunk of the whole Spanish Wikipedia community jump ship. End result: the Spanish Wikipedia was severely damaged, and even years later, remains well behind where it ought to be: only 650k articles, less than even Japanese and Polish, despite vastly greater numbers of Spanish speakers. It seems an apt comparison because the fundamental issues here seem to do with process, and possible future eventualities - rather than some current impassible stumbling block. Steve ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
On 02/10/2010 03:04, Serge Wroclawski wrote: 3) OSM has external organizational support OSM now has organizational, government and commercial support. That's something none of the forks will have. And for the pubic-domainers- any organization who wants to use the OSM stack without the OSM database can (and in some cases) already have done so. From what I understand, it appears that OSM is cutting ties with many of these due to the wording of the new license/CT. If the fork goes ahead there will be less data in OSM than the forks. Cheers Dave F. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 10:26 AM, Dave F. dave...@madasafish.com wrote: From what I understand, it appears that OSM is cutting ties with many of these due to the wording of the new license/CT. That's totally wrong. We're seeing greater commercial support than ever before, and we're seeing (for example) the French government adopt the OBbL. I've been around the FLOSS community a long time (since 1997) and I've seen lots of these forks. Forks are almost always bad. There are a few times when a fork is necessary (such as the OpenSolaris fork into Illumos and the OpenOffice fork to LibreOffice) but in anything but extraordinary circumstances, all a fork does it hurt the community by splitting the efforts up. I don't think all the forkers are inherently evil, but I do think that these efforts to compete with OSM will just result in overall worse data for OSM and for any potential other project out there, and that's really a shame. - Serge ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 7:25 PM, Serge Wroclawski emac...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 10:26 AM, Dave F. dave...@madasafish.com wrote: From what I understand, it appears that OSM is cutting ties with many of these due to the wording of the new license/CT. That's totally wrong. We're seeing greater commercial support than ever before, Really ? Can you name a single commercial company who said that they are going to do something more with the data after the license change ? SteveC hinted at it a few times, without giving any details. and we're seeing (for example) the French government adopt the OBbL. Well the US government has consistently stuck to PD for many decades. And they have released a LOT more data. (TIGER, SRTM, GPS, Landsat etc). ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
Hi With the various forks that could/are taking place within OSM I'm curious if there are any other examples? If so, what were their outcomes? Did any re-converge? Cheers Dave F. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 8:45 PM, Dave F. dave...@madasafish.com wrote: Hi With the various forks that could/are taking place within OSM I'm curious if there are any other examples? If so, what were their outcomes? Did any re-converge? OSM is a somewhat unique in that it's not a software project. In that way it's more like Wikipedia. At the same time, we have a larger ecosystem of software than Wikipedia, and we have more groups using our stack (including our data) externally than Wikipedia. There are many reasons projects fork, and you can do searching on forks and their success. In general the reason a project forks is that the original project has stagnated and the current maintainers are unresponsive. Or (as we're seeing now with many of the Sun projects), the original maintainer is no longer going to put resources toward the project. Occasionally you see projects fork for personal reasons, often a mix of personality conflict combined with some technical decision. Here are some famous forks, and how I think they did over time: EGCS and PGCC There was a time when GCC development had become slow. During this time, two new compilers were developed as forks to merge several experimental features back in. The most well known compiler collection was EGCS. The GNU project eventually decided that ECGS was doing a better job at handling the process, and ECGS was merged back into GCC. This is a very purposeful fork, where the developers all shared the hope that it would be merged back in, and and it was. OpenBSD OpenBSD originated as a fork of NetBSD in 1995, mostly due to (rumored) personality clashes with Theo de Rault and the other NetBSD developers. OpenBSD is a very successful project overall, but then again, so is NetBSD. I'd argue OpenBSD has been successful, but illustrative of one commonality most forks have- which is that the original project doesn't stop, and has a life of its own. XEmacs In the mid 90s a company called Lucid decided to develop a set of tools to make Emacs easier to use for specialized editing applications. The result was Lucid Emacs. GNU Emacs was still being maintained at the time, and the fork was largely without notifying the larger Emacs community, so what was left after Lucid folded was a large amount of high quality code. This became the basis of XEmacs, a fork of GNU Emacs. There was an attempt at merging XEmacs back into GNU Emacs. The reason the code couldn't be merged back is that the GNU project has very strict requirements for code contributions. In order to provide ongoing legal protection services and facilitate things like GPL migration, it requires all official GNU code to be signed over to the FSF. XEmacs had dubious copyright issues. Some of the code was written by Lucid (and thus owned by the company who bought the IP rights), some by individual contributors, who were hard to find, and some by companies. After all was said and done, the FSF said that while the license was okay, the copyright assignment never could be, and was forced not to accept the changes back. This meant there were two emacsen. XEmacs was superior for a long time. The code was better and it was more featureful. But now GNU Emacs has caught up on all the features it cares about, and has exceeded XEmacs in terms of features. Both communities seem to view the fork as a problem for the community, spitting development efforts, and resulting in incompatible Elisp code. It took more than a decade for the original project to regain its prominence. Citizendium Most people may not even be aware that there's a competitor to Wikipedia called Citizendium. Citizendium started off as a fork, based on the idea that Wikipedia was unreliable and required experts to certify the information was correct. Citizendium decided before its launch that it couldn't fork WIkipedia for the reasons above, and started from scratch. During this time, its backers would speak to academics and others about why their project was superior, arguing in favor of greater reliability and control by knowledgeable officials. My opinion on Citizendium is that even despite getting backing from old school academics that the project hasn't really succeeded. Most people haven't even heard of it, and despite its self imposed editorial process, people go to Wikipedia more. Now my opinion of any potential OpenStreetMap fork. I think such a project would fail, and here are my reasons why: 1) OSM is in a growth phase Most forks are triggered by a stagnation in the development process and that's not happening with OSM. OSM is still in its exponential growth phase. We have more users and developers than we've ever had before. 2) The forkers don't agree on the reason to fork The forkers don't seem to agree on why they want to fork. Some want to fork because they want the database to remain CC-BY-SA. Others want a whole new map that's (effectively) public domain (whether that's CC0 or CC-BY, or something else),
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
On 2 October 2010 12:04, Serge Wroclawski emac...@gmail.com wrote: In general the reason a project forks is that the original project has stagnated and the current maintainers are unresponsive. Or (as we're seeing now with many of the Sun projects), the original maintainer is no longer going to put resources toward the project. Occasionally you see projects fork for personal reasons, often a mix of personality conflict combined with some technical decision. They also tend to fork due to licensing. 4) No fork is offering any compelling reason to use it over OSM You make some fairly shallow assumptions. CommonMap (CC-by) is operating under a similar premise as the USGS (CC0/PD) the main/only difference being they wish to be able to interact with other government departments but the different countries (AU v US) require different licenses. As for any CC-by-SA fork, there is already a large database of data that won't have to have data removed, and there is also other resources that is only also available under cc-by-sa licensing. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Are there any other projects in a similar fork situation? (Slightly OT)
Hi Serge, On 2/10/2010 12:04 PM, Serge Wroclawski wrote: Now my opinion of any potential OpenStreetMap fork. I think such a project would fail, and here are my reasons why: If failure is the opposite of success, what are your criteria for success? 2) The forkers don't agree on the reason to fork True. Others want a whole new map that's (effectively) public domain (whether that's CC0 or CC-BY, or something else) Yes. If you believe strongly in public domain geodata, you won't find BY-SA acceptable, Is this really the case? I actually investigated the use of public domain principles - however Australian copyright law does not allow it. The best we can do is a CC BY with zero attribution. If there's anyone out there who can let me know why zero attribution is not a good enough substitute for public domain, I'd like to get in contact with you. 3) OSM has external organizational support OSM now has organizational, government and commercial support. That's something none of the forks will have. I beg to differ. CommonMap (the CC BY of which you write) definitely has Australian Government interest. CC BY-SA suffers from a flaw that government cannot take back anything from the community. And any support given by government (from what I've seen) applies equally to CC BY repositories as well. I haven't seen anything from the forkers that gives the average user a compelling reason to switch. The average contributor doesn't care about whether the license is CC-BY-SA or ODbL. And since OSM has the mindshare, developer mindshare and financial resources backing it, it's likely to remain ahead. Again, all depends on your criteria for success. Just having a one stop shop for public sector geodata would be achievement enough from a personal perspective. The ability for all the local knowledge to be fed back to government is certainly icing on the cake. Thanks, Brendan ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
