On 09/06/2020 16:00, Simon Poole wrote:
Nearly all of the original authors left Mapbox a long time ago, nobody working on it today is an "original author". The grant that Mapbox received at the time was clearly instrumental in allowing them to start growing the company to its current size, so while we are obviously thankful for the support that Mapbox has provided over the years, it was clearly a win-win situation.
Who owns the iD project now? What's happened after "nearly all of the original authors left Mapbox", has the project ownership been transferred from Mapbox to OSMF, or perhaps to current maintainers? Does Mapbox still retain the ownership rights to the project (even if they don't currently care about them)?
The code license is very permissive so there is always an option of starting a new project based on it (forking). But the license and ownership of the project are not the same thing.
Many would have argued that the OSMF should have received the half a million dollars and contracted the work out, maybe to Mapbox, but in any case just because what actually happened was slightly different, doesn't mean that the OSMF and the OSM community gave whoever happens to be working on iD the licence to control the projects destiny forever.
Not saying that this shouldn't be the case, but clearly it wasn't, at least initially. And if it isn't ours we can't simply take it, even if we really, really want it.
From my point of view - I am happy with the current project governance. It works well for iD, it works well for the OSM community. Controversies are all around minor issues and contributions - basically saying that the maintainers are doing their job.
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