Hi Steve, Am Donnerstag, den 02.07.2009, 16:42 +0100 schrieb SteveC: > I think we already have, but we'd just be re-iterating the arguments. > I continue to think that if OSM went PD, then I or Google or whoever > will just take the data and improve it and not give back. OSM would > always be the slightly worse map than everyone else. My personal > feeling is that OSM should be the best map of the world and PD would > give that away. > > Like I said in the email you pointed to, if you fork OSM with a PD > version, then OSM will just take all of your edits and put them in > it's reciprocal version, or someone else will. I can tell you a lot of > companies would love to relegate OSM to a cheap way for them to fix > the map. It would be a dream come true for Tele Atlas to just take our > data and not give anything back, and just use us as a bug fixing > service.
I fully agree. Those, who use the OSM DB and add or change data, must be required to give back all those changes into the DB. So any licence change must ensure that - PD will result into exactly the situation Steve described above. To put it simple: Whenever OSM should become PD, I will stop my efforts and work on it. Of course commercial companies can use a data converter/script to create binary (==small and compact) maps for their navigation SW from the OSM DB - as long as people are not charged for the map data itself, but only for the reasonable costs to create and maintain the nav SW and data converters. Ideally the data converter should be open-source or the binary format should be documented at least. So people can do open-source converters for the favourite nav SW. -- Carsten Schlote <carsten.schl...@gmx.net> _______________________________________________ Talk-de mailing list Talk-de@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-de