Thank you Kathleen and Tobias,

This is some very valuable insight.

 

>From our terms of use, we could likely open the content, but you are right – 
>it is about what users think. Hence, we will and can ask them. Thanks a lot 
>for rising this point. 

One rising concern, when I read your text, Kathleen, is the GDPR – what happens 
if a user wants content deleted and it is already copied all over the web by an 
open license. Or even worse, a user uploads a picture of a scenery and there 
are human faces in the scenery .. and this picture is distributed. I see 
potential problems here for us and the organizations using the pictures. 
Additional thoughts please? 

 

I like the Wikipedia and in special the Wikivoyage direction also. Does 
somebody know the best touchpoints to get in contact with the community there?

 

In general, I agree to what you said that manual work for content filtering and 
legal issues would be needed – what is also one point for us to discuss with 
the community first: We can provide the software and open source the stuff, but 
to create valuable content for the specific use cases, we’ll need the community 
and partners who share common goals to get this successfully going. So all 
ideas in this direction are welcome, too.

Best

Tim

 

Von: Kathleen Lu <kathleen...@mapbox.com> 
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 16. Mai 2018 00:25
An: Tobias Knerr <o...@tobias-knerr.de>
Cc: Tim Frey <tim.f...@iunera.com>; talk@openstreetmap.org
Betreff: Re: [OSM-talk] Open sourcing of POI pictures for OSM App/STAPPZ - 
Feedback and ideas wanted

 

Hi Tim,

Your app and what you hope to do with it both sound interesting. I hope you are 
successful.

Here's some more information on the open licensing front to consider:

 - In order to have the legal rights necessary to "open" the material your 
users contributed, you would likely needed to have gotten a perpetual 
irrevocable royalty-free license with an unlimited right to sublicense (not 
limited to only your affiliates, etc), or an assignment, though the latter is 
far more than needed.

 - But would use of the photos/text outside of the STAPPZ app be consistent 
with your users' expectations for their photos/text? If no, then even if you 
can legally do it you may be passing an unwelcome burden to an open community.

 - What open license would you provide the photos/text under? CC-BY is a common 
one for photos, though it is not inherently compatible with ODbL (the license 
for OSM). There is however a waiver template that makes CC-BY it compatible 
with ODbL: https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2017/03/17/use-of-cc-by-data/

There is the separate issue with CC-BY that users are supposed to attribute the 
author. Do your users expect/want their names to be attributed to the photos if 
they are used outside the App? This may raise data privacy issues a well 
(especially with GDPR coming into enforcement).

 - As for open source of the code, you'll have a choice between a permissive 
license (e.g. MIT, BSD, ISC, DWTFYW) or a copyleft license (e.g. GPL, LGPL) or 
something in between (MPL, Apache). Permissive licenses make it easier for 
someone else to take over the project, though there is the possibility that 
they will take it in a direction you do not like (e.g., build a new version but 
not open the code to the new version). Copyleft licenses are intended to guard 
against this, but most companies do not like working with copyleft code and 
many ban it, so there would be a smaller pool of potential interest.  

You can see OSMF's current open source projects here: 
https://github.com/openstreetmap. The licenses currently used are ISC, BSD, 
DWTFYW, Apache 2.0, and GPL.

Best of luck! 

-Kathleen

 

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 2:45 PM Tobias Knerr <o...@tobias-knerr.de 
<mailto:o...@tobias-knerr.de> > wrote:

Hi Tim,

On 11.05.2018 17:19, Tim Frey wrote:
> Out of this, we consider, heavily, to “open source” the licensing of the
> user created STAPPZ content for the OSM community. In addition, we also
> consider to open source the backend of STAPPZ and the IOS and Android
> app to make a community project out of it.

I'm going to split this reply into two parts: About the content, and
about the software itself.


As for the content, a lot depends on if you can publish the images under
the terms of an open license.¹ That's a legal question, but probably
also a bit of a social one (i.e. would this be in line with what the
creators expected when they shared their images on your app, or would
they be unpleasantly surprised/unhappy about this).

Assuming the answer is that yes, you can publish them, the next question
is what to do with the images. OSM does not currently have an image
hosting platform, so if we're only talking about contributing the
images, they would need to be donated to a separate platform.

The obvious recipient for such an image donation would be Wikimedia
Commons, as they're the most popular repository for open-licensed media.
Images on Commons can be linked with OpenStreetMap POIs² and are used as
such by some OSM-based maps. Of course, they're also used by Wikipedia
and its sister projects – notably Wikitravel, which is a crowdsourced
travel guide (although much closer to the traditional book format than
your project).

A caveat is that such a donation would likely require some manual effort
to filter out lower-quality pictures or duplicates, and to add
meaningful descriptions. Still, assuming the legalities work out, it
seems feasible to donate the images and would be a generous contribution
to the open content ecosystem.


Ok, so let's talk about the app and backend a bit. I'm not sure how
familiar you are with OSM's organizational model, but as a rule we're
very decentralized – even core components of OSM are being developed as
mostly independent Open Source projects. For you, this means that even
if there's community interest, any re-use of your project would probably
still start out with _you_ spearheading its development, re-imagining it
as something you believe fits a need of the OSM community, and trying to
gain mindshare in the OSM contributor and developer community. Of
course, this may be at odds with your goal to focus on other projects.

If this does not discourage you, though, let's consider what needs the
software could serve. I don't have any amazing ideas to offer, but I
could see two basic roles in the OSM ecosystem an image platform might
potentially be able to fill. Broadly speaking:
* Images could be used internally by OSM contributors as a data source
for mapping in addition to sources as aerial imagery and GPS tracks.
* Images could be displayed by user-facing sites and apps alongside OSM
data. (I believe this is what you were getting at with your Google Maps
comparison.)

The former use case is already partially covered by
Mapillary/OpenStreetCam, so the question is if there's enough of a niche
left for another app.

The latter seems more ambitious. As I mentioned before, mappers are
currently using tags like image=* with links to external platforms to
add images to OSM POI. Those links can technically point anywhere,
although Wikimedia Commons currently appears to be the most popular
platform to host the images. Inviting users (including non-mappers) to
easily contribute images to a dedicated, OSM-affiliated platform might
be a worthwhile cause. Not sure how well this fits your platform's
existing social features, though.

Tobias


¹ Typically one of the open CC licenses: CC0, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA.
² Using http://wiki.osm.org/Key:image
or http://wiki.osm.org/Key:wikimedia_commons

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