I never participate in any mailing list discussion, but seeing the communication campaign for the new license and this project
being so important for me i'll break my rule. Let me first thank you for the brilliant idea of OSM which for me and surely for many others has made a dream come through. Having said this I would like to comment on three issues which were mentioned in this thread: a) SOTM Is is not ok to slap students with very little money by pretending that the conference is not expensive. You yourself admit that it is expensive internally by giving discounts for founding members i.e. the interest group (I don't like the term foundation in this context). Also I remember much bigger Linux events which were free. The very topic is that the interest group is financing the management of the project by the mappers who already do the work! How come that one of the biggest crowdsourcing ventures in the internet world can't be financed by IBM, Bertelsman foundation, Royal geographic society or by Wikipedia. (No, I won't organize conferences or look for sponsors. I' am sitting here in Senegal nearly at the end of the world) b) License All problems with the license can be backtracked to the value of the information collected and the wish to extend the commercial use. That is ok with with me. What is not ok is that the license permits keeping the information in my bank safe and only distribute it for a "reasonable production fee". Again: Such a big project has to prescribe the use of the internet for each and every bit of information, so that that the information stays freely accessible and usable. The license excludes any patent and branding aspects (2.3). Maybe that is necessary. I will however be assured that i always can have free access and and use of the information without getting to know that the information is free but the data interface is patented and the data model is branded. Yes I know, nobody has ever thought of, but Michael Jackson never thought of selling his furniture and Bjön Borg never meant to sell his trophy's. c) communication I went to the website of the interest group and read that the last minutes of meeting date form april. If that is not in contradiction to the things said in this thread than at least there is lot of room for improvement to insert the discussion process in the interest group into the news and blogs of OSM. ______________________________________________________ GRATIS für alle WEB.DE-Nutzer: Die maxdome Movie-FLAT! Jetzt freischalten unter http://movieflat.web.de _______________________________________________ Talk-de mailing list Talk-de@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-de
