First of all, remapping existing ways, whether for OSM or for FOSM, or for any other fork, is an annoying waste of time, and I have always called it a madness, and I still would prefer to reuse existing ways if it was legally possible. Months ago, I was a strong supporter of improving existing ways in order to honor previous contributors.
However, the Licence Working Group has threatened to delete all ways made by decliners (or even non-responders), even if they have been later edited by CT-accepting mappers. There is no legal obligation to do so, but the OSMF does not have any cent to enforce their potential rights in a lawsuit. However, this license change, and the way how it was announced, has disappointed many mappers who refused to accept, mainly based on personal sentiments. I don't really know whether Nearmap was so much better than Bing. The problem is caused by mappers who are refusing to relicense their data without any valid reason. In general, the relicensing process is just a formality: You allow any user to use the database either under CC-by-sa or under ODbL license. This license is NON-exclusive: it allows to contribute this data for ANY project, whether OSM or FOSM or any other project. I don't have any problems with contributing to both projects as well. Many legislations, e.g. in the United States, Japan and many European countries, do not allow minorities to refuse their consent without any valid reason nor do they consider facts as protected by copyright. Simple facts (e.g. real street names) are NEVER protected by copyright, otherwise it would be a copyright violation to use them in any way. > Just because someone has a individual view that some data isn't covered by copyright doesn't make it so. Are you a lawyer who can decide whether data is protected by copyright or not? If you think that I have violated any copyright, please make a lawsuit against me - I will give my address to your lawyer, but I will consider all your accusations as unsubstantial if you don't start a lawsuit against me. Oh, it's easier to write a letter to the LWG and to tell them fairytales about potential lawsuits than to make a real one! Truth (e.g. real street names) is not covered by copyright, otherwise it would be a copyright violation to tell it. Only lies (invented ideas) may be protected by copyright as they are invented by the liar himself. It would be the easiest solution if as many Australian mappers as possible would simply click the "Accept Button" - not for Steve or any of the board members, but just in order not to disappoint the 46,000 collaborating mappers who have agreed so far. OpenStreetMap once started to provide one free map for all. Now it seems that two fighting projects are claiming a copyright for each byte or letter within the database, just in order to damage the other project rather than making a benefit for whole humanity. ODbL was intended to exchange datasets between different projects, e.g. OSM and GoogleMapMaker (provided they agree). It was intended to facilitate small (three-digit) extracts that are not covered by any copyright or database right. It was intended to facilitate derived maps under another license (e.g. weather maps or congestion maps which are quickly outdated). All of these benefits would not be feasable, at least for Australia, if you continue not to accept the new license. -- NEU: FreePhone - 0ct/min Handyspartarif mit Geld-zurück-Garantie! Jetzt informieren: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/freephone _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
