In system management, success is reaching the
next bottle neck. My take away from Alex's
concern is "What is the next bottle neck for OSM
to focus on?" We can already see some of the
great successes that MapBox has created from the
ideas used to make a slippy map. I am so
thankful for the whole idea of mbtiles. What a
wonderful idea. I am so thankful for TileMill.
I show people TillMill and how they can use it
to get into GIS with a limited budget. These
people can save a ton of cash and learn the same
important concepts behind GIS without more
expensive tools. However, I don't believe that
the license is the next bottleneck. The next
bottleneck to face is something more like
creating the iD editor.
I understand the Gift Culture. I've been to
Burning Man a dozen times. OK, more or less: it
might be eleven, it might be thirteen or
fourteen. I have just barely lost count, so it
is somewhere between 11 and 14 (starting in 1995,
when there were only "hundreds" or "low
thousands" there, not the tens of thousands I've
seen in past years). Yet still: the Gift
Culture is real.
I've just described the gift culture of the open
source/data world. My dentist doesn't get it.
He thinks that I should make as much money as I
can. Why are you giving this away? MapBox has
gifted us some great things. Part of my gift
back is to use a project or tell other people
about these gifts. Corporations don't always
get this idea. We can look to the recent
example of Oracle Corporation and the
Jenkins/Hudson controversy. In short, Oracle
wanted to take complete control of the open
source Hudson project. The rift was so bad that
Jenkins was forked out of Hudson so that the
project could continue. In a perfect world,
I'd say Alex, let's change the license so that
we can share things better with one another.
However, I can't. Others don't understand that
gift culture like you and I do. From all bad
things that I've seen, I wouldn't license the
data under any other license than ODbl.
My experience with OSM for nearly five years has
been largely my ".org side" of giving back as a
volunteer. Sometimes it potentially strays into
the ".com realm," as I do run a software
consultancy that charges by the hour. I haven't
yet billed for hours yet for any OSM work, but I
don't rule it out in the future. The Gift
Culture and volunteering blurs a bit with my .org
and .com worlds. I suspect there are others for
whom this is true as well.
ODbl isn't the only license that causes legal heartburn.
There is a liquid boundary right now going on.
Part of it is because of differences in Europe
and USA, part of it is cultural, as in "freedom"
(of Information Act at a federal level, Public
Record Acts making for "green pastures" regarding
data openness), part of it is corporate as in
"what the courts have said and are likely TO
say...".
<redacted>
Greg addresses heady issues which are not germane
to my responses, so I hereby duck out of this
thread.
Next problem with this ideal is that OSM cannot
guarantee the integrity of the data once it has
been placed into the OSM database. I started to
map pedestrian crossings. I am OK that a
crossing is not rendered at this time because I
use a node for a crossing, a node for a traffic
light, and another crossing node to help line up
intersections. I also thought that it would be
a great way to sell governments on the use of
this kind-of data to maintain their annual
restriping of crosswalks. A new mapper comes
along and starts deleting the crossing data
because cartographers have not rendered the
data. The data were/are considered map clutter.
I guess the reason is that if I cannot see the
data rendered, then why do I have to plow
through it in an editor?
I will say that iD allows very entry-level
editors to make significant contributions
(witness the University of California Santa Cruz
students of CMPE 80A who enter
mobility/handicapped data like tactile_paving and
crosswalks and bus_stop data). While the editor
might largely contribute to them "getting this
wrong," it isn't hard (but it is a bit of work)
to "clean up" these data. So, it's a step in the
right direction for early users to use iD,
especially if they make "sloppy" errors, but the
data they enter are important and valuable.
I agree with Greg's characterization that it is
important to get contributions (even if slightly
"goofed") which can be "cleaned up" or
"harmonized" later. See, "getting data in" is
important, and "getting data in right" is
important. Both don't need to happen at the same
time (though it is good if they do), as "cleanup"
can happen. In fact, it is valuable as it does,
even as a two-step process.
What Greg says about ugly tiles reminds me of
osmaender (sp?) from circa 2011. That was an
ugly renderer in many cases, but showed tagging
at a "ragged" level. Maybe we can get to
something like that again.
Vector tiles are not the solution if the
resulting tiles are the just more of the same
minimalist map tiles. We need a real mapper's
map again. We need tiles that are so butt ugly
only a mother would hang the project tiles on
her fridge because that's what little Johnny did
in school today. The type of butt ugly tiles I
am talking about are something like Tiles@Home,
<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tiles@Home>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tiles@Home.
The magic of T@H was that I was rewarded as a
young mapper. It was magic when I saw the first
traffic=hump that I added to the database show
up on the map. From there, it was an Easter egg
hunt to find traffic calming humps as I could
while I fixed tiger data.
Touché, Greg. That is a very useful toolchain.
A license change is not what OSM needs. The
Linux project held firm to their license even
though businesses complained. Corporations are
contributing to the project now. Even Microsoft
has contributed to the kernel after years of
calling the GPL a cancer. OSM needs to hold
firm to the license that we have. As people
have pointed out a permissive license would
allow companies to just sweep the OSM data into
their database without gifting back. I've spent
a great deal of my resources in the way of
enjoyable time exploring and mapping my part of
the world. That has been my gift to the project
and fellow mappers. Businesses need to figure
out how to join in and what they can regift to
the project. If they can't, then there are
always other paid alternatives to OSM data.
They have to weight the perceived cost of
giving up data verses the cost of paying a
service provider like Google to keep their IP.
Yup. Simply said: yup.
I hope this helps,
It does, Greg. Thank you.
SteveA
California
_______________________________________________
Talk-us mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
