On 7 April 2011 12:57, David Murn <[email protected]> wrote: > If the Australian issue is so important, as others have suggested why > isnt OSMF seeking to make a rapid agreement with NearMap as was done > with Bing?
This really needs to be done. Is wonder if this is just due to a shortage of time that the LWG hasn't included this as yet? It would be nice to think that seeing this issue primary affects Australians, that we could take the lead in doing this. However, I don't know how many on the OSM-AU list are ready to help in this kind of endevour? There are a range of approaches we could look at from both the Nearmap and the LWG perspectives. On the Nearmap side, there is clearly in my opinion a business benefit to Nearmap of having the OSM data closely aligned to the Nearmap images. It gives them an accurate, free and up-to-date streetmap layer, and for the foreseeable future attribution within the OSM data. And lets face it, the value in Nearmap's business proposition is accuracy and currency. If OSM went off the rails (and scrapped ODbL) in a way Nearmap didn't like, withdrawing OSM support from that moment onwards would see the data quickly lose currency. On the OSM side, I recognise several of the top contributors list as being nearmap mappers, and I'd hazard a guess that we are looking at possibly over 20% of the Australian data possibly impacted by this, so working this through has large benefits to OSM. At the most extreme end it could make the difference whether a viable OSM community continues in Australia under the OSM banner. There is a strong case if all else fails to allow at least the current nearmap data to be imported under a very ephemeral set of contributor terms just for this purpose, allowing the nearmap derived data to survive as long as the the attribution model persists. After all Nearmap are only objecting to a possibility of a future licence change, not the ODbL itself - and that may be many years distant. Jeopardising OSM in Australia at this juncture doesn't seem worth it when by the time we come to consider the next licence change the world of aerial image will likely have evolved dramatically. Ian. _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
