Richard, > In my view, what matters is someone's _overall_ contribution to OSM, not > their unquestioning adherence to the doctrine of "free".
I am not talking about classifying *people* into "properly open" and "proprietary" - I wanted to classify *projects*. The author of, say, openmtbmap can be the nicest guy & major OSM contributor; if openmtbmap is - for whatever valid reason - not open in the sense of letting everyone else look into and use openmtbmap, then we should very clearly make this distinction, rather than act as if openmtbmap were as open as OpenStreetMap itself. The same author may have other projects which are properly open and which we would of course praise as such. > Faced with one person who makes an enormous contribution to OSM, but > chooses to keep one aspect of their contributions closed-source; and > another whose main contribution is a lot of wiki voting, but has sent > two preset patches, assiduously annotated with some inordinate licence > preamble in capital letters - well, I couldn't criticise the former or > deny them any "respect". And "applying pressure" rather smacks of that > "Proper attribution" lynch mob. I think it is really important to not take this to the personal level. Just because user X does something propietary with OSM data doesn't mean that he is less of a nice guy. However (on the other hand) just because he is a nice guy doesn't mean that something proprietary he produces should be treated as if it was part of the family. I'm doing business with OSM and I'm not ashamed to say that some things I do are proprietary. Others are open. I don't expect my proprietary stuff to feature prominently on the OSM web pages. I would not feel ostracised if OSM makes the distinction, saying about some "these are cool projects that share the OSM spirit of openness and we fully embrace & recommend them" and about others "these are other projects/services using OSM data but they are non-free". > Hey, I managed a whole post about "Not-properly-Open" without mentioning > the GPL. ...oh crap. Well, of course in my mind I'm not making the distinction between a) free/open and b) proprietary, but between a**) absolutely free and not requiring to sell your soul to RMS, a) free/open if you sell your soul, b) proprietary. But I felt that was too much to recommend in one go. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
