On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 8:18 PM, Ben Laenen <[email protected]> wrote: > "The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international not-for-profit organization > supporting, but not controlling, the OpenStreetMap Project." >
This statement is really wishful thinking on the part of the OSMF. By virtue of the domain name and the trademarks owned by it, the organization do have an extraordinary amount of control over the project. Many people accepted the CTs giving the organization even more control. Look what is happening with the openoffice.org domain. Even when LibreOffice was/is clearly a superior product, openoffice.org still had a tremendous amount of hits and downloads. Another way to interpret the quoted statement is to say that the OSMF will only make changes when there is overwhelming support from the community. This has a number of problems: 1. Deciding not to change something is also a decision. 2. How do they know that there is overwhelming support from the community ? (I don't believe the license change passed this test) and 3. And waiting for the community to get 100% behind a change can take a very long time. If we want to compete with Google Map Maker, we may need to act much faster. In the short term people should either become OSMF members or live with the consequences. In the long term, we could adopt a process where voting does not cost anything. (For example, I recently received a couple of messages from Wikimedia saying that my small number of edits made me eligible to vote in their election). Regards, Nic _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
