Matthew Luehrmann wrote: > Who controls OSM? I really am not sure. My current understanding is that > OSMF controls OSM, but calls it "supporting": "The OpenStreetMap Foundation > is an international non-profit organisation supporting but not controlling > the project." > > Maybe a better question that will get a less ambiguous answer, and really > shows who is in control of OSM, is: Who owns the www.openstreetmap.org domain > name.
As far as I know, OSMF owns the domain www.openstreetmap.org, as does it own the servers on which OSM runs. But how does that not fit the definition of "Support". OSMF runs all the infrastructure and provides the technical support to run OSM and make it possible and therefore support it. It does not however interfere with any tagging, decide what to map or what not to map, decide what gets rendered on the map or any other of those types of aspects that you might consider control OSM. It also does not own other domains like openstreetmap.de or all the other servers that are part of OSM, such as the t...@h, trapi or XAPI server or any of the servers hosting the national sites. It does not own copyright on the data (otherwise there wouldn't be a need for a licensing debate). So altogether, if OSMF died or got taken over, OpenStreetMap would still survive and continue, even though it would hurt it considerably. So I think that fits quite nicely into the idea of "supporting the community" rather than controlling it. And even the licensing debate could be seen as "support" even though that indeed has a little bit more of a controlling element to it. But it is support in that the current license is broken and inapplicable to geodata as has every lawyer they have asked so far said (as far as I can tell). They then went and spent an enormous amount of time discussing the issue with various copyright lawyers, with OSM community members and anyone else who wanted to discuss it and help with the progress and make sure that the views of the entire community get heard in the legal process. And now that they have come up with a proposal that is as close as possible in spirit to the old license that everyone has agreed to, they first present it for a vote to OSMF members and if they agree that it is good enough present it for a vote to all members. Kai > > > _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
