As people should now be aware there is currently there is an issue, not so much with ODBL, but the new Terms and Conditions people have to agree to stating that OSM can change to other "free" licenses in future without requiring consent, while in theory this is a great idea since if there is a compelling reason to change/upgrade the license they can do so without all the problems occurring now, however due to the absence of requiring such a free license to be cc-by compatible (require some form of attribution) this then means any cc-by data would now have to be expunged from the system.
Currently we have a fair bit of cc-by data in the system, things like ABS boundaries and in turn any data derived from such data, but so far there is only assumptions on how much data is this exactly, especially in Europe where the assumption is the majority of data has been relicensed or is clean to begin with, so they don't care about anyone else who may be effected by this change, but of course the big unknown is how many contributors will actually agree to this change, especially some of the more prolific editors. The $20mill dollar question however is this, and this is the pragmatic part, what would the state of the map be tomorrow if the license change over happened if all the cc-by data and derived data disappeared. For the purposes of this exercise I'll just make the blind assumption that anything with attribution=* would be considered cc-by, obviously this isn't a perfect test since some people have stripped the attribution information and other data may not have been attributed properly, then again even ODBL data could be tainted, and subtly enough to corrupt large chunks of the database, however this should give us a pretty good idea of what we're dealing with rather than keep making blind assumptions. I found that there is 97,573 ways/nodes/relations within an Australia bounding box with an attribution tag, although there needs to be a lot more interrogation of the data to make this a much more tangible and suitable for making objective decisions based on it. Although I did create a noattribution navit[1] file and a gosmore file[2] to try and help with visualising. The above 98k objects make up about 8M of compressed data[3], while this wouldn't be completely devastating, we're not just talking ABS data, there is a lot more to it like points of interest and national parks and other such things. As Kai wrote in another thread, the loss of data could have a big demoralising effect on anyone that spent time cleaning up or otherwise manipulating that data. Those that are so gung-ho to push through their own agendas might want to push for a small change to the TCs ensure attribution and most of this discussion would disappear, rather than alienating[4] people that contribute data from regional areas that we have enough trouble sourcing by any other means, that is unless they want to come and recruit others that would also do the work for free instead. Although I'm not sure what the point is of moving to another attribution/share-a-like license, if the TCs undermine this, unless of course the intent is to eventually force everyone to go to PD long term, but doing it on the sly hoping no one notices where things are headed. [1] http://map-data.bigtincan.com/data/australia-noattribution.navit.bin [2] http://map-data.bigtincan.com/data/australia-noattribution.pak [3] 149,017,722 v 157,576,420 respectively [4] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2010-July/003441.html _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
