On Jul 17, 2010, at 12:06 PM, 80n wrote: > In other words, we were wrong, we chose the wrong license out of ignorance. > Shit happens. > > Yeah, shit happens, OSM becomes outrageously successful and nobody abuses the > spirit of the license. What kind of shit is that?
People abuse it all the time, cf Nike and many others. I'm not surprised it's low level anyway right now, the amount of abuse will be a function of the completeness of the data. We're not really a routable dataset just yet and most of the planet is missing address data. As we approach these points fast, the amount of abuse will go up with it. Anyway. Let me make two points: My take on the idea of having a vote on whether we'd theoretically move to the ODbL so long as everyone else does... is that it's basically just a vote on whether to have a vote. It's also without any consequences. The consequences part: Because nothing will really happen either way if the majority of this proposed step vote yes or no, that means that the incentives to vote yes or no are vastly different than saying yes or no to the actual license change. That means that people will vote differently and perhaps to the extent that it will be uncorrelated with an actual license change decision. In other words, your reasons for voting yes or no 'theoretically' are very different to voting yes or no in actuality. If anyone here has a degree in economics or psychology they'd be able to wave around all kinds of textbooks showing how hard it is to measure things like this when you have no real incentives - for example asking people if they'd pay for and go to a gym to get fit - we all know people say they'd like to do those things and never do. Based on the theoretical vote being wildly inaccurate and also not really affecting anything, I say the LWG should just push ahead with the plan. If everyone catastrophically says 'no' to the ODbL (which I doubt, but hey) then they can go back to the drawing board with a concrete result. If we all agree, then we can just get on with mapping. But going back to the drawing board with a proxy to a vote - a vote on whether to have a vote - is incredibly flimsy and will just pull out everyone on the other side of the argument who'll charge that it was an invalid vote. In sum, having a vote on whether to have a vote just slows us all down for no particular reason. Therefore, just put the voluntary license change thing out there (so people can change if they want to) and continue with the rest of the plan. If it turns out to be awful and we lost lots of people (which I doubt) then you can consider things at that stage. Oh and by the way, as a thought experiment - if 50% of people drop out due to the license change then you only have to wait a few months for the data to be put back in by other new people - go and look at the user growth and data growth graphs. It's really not as bad as it looks, even under a bad scenario like 50%. My second point - have a think on what affect you're all having on the people in the LWG. They've now been working on this for _years_ meeting every week. That's a huge amount of effort and investment. These are good people doing their best to find a way forward. But, every time they do something, the mailing lists fill up with new things they should do which leads to a steady state - they complete one task and then are given a new one to do without actually approaching the goal. They have to balance this with a fair number of people complaining that it's taking them forever to get anywhere. That's not a fun situation to be in. For years. Very few of us here with all these opinions and time on the mailing list - whether they are good, bad or ugly opinions - have the time, whatever our position for or against the license etc, to sit through this stuff week after week in the working group and push this stuff forward. I'm worried that we're going to burn the guys on the LWG out. They must feel like they're in some kafka-esque dialogue with no upside for them. They chose to be on the working group and do all this work of course, but the worst thing that could happen is that they conclude that it will take another couple of years to get anywhere and decide to go and do something more useful with their time. I know for a fact that some of them don't even read some of these mailing lists anymore because of it. So why don't we just cool off a bit and give them a nod of thanks before diving on with this stuff - whatever direction it goes in. Steve stevecoast.com _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
