2009/12/17 Jean-Marc Liotier <j...@liotier.org>

> The quality of OpenStreetMap's work speaks for itself, but it seems that
> we need to speak about it too - especially now that Google is attempting
> to to appear as holding the moral high ground by using terms such as
> "citizen cartographer" that they rob of its meaning by conveniently
> forgetting to mention the license under which the contributed data is
> held. But in the eye of the public, the $50000 UNICEF donation to the
> home country of the winner of the Map Maker Global Challenge lets them
> appear as charitable citizens. We need to explain why it is a fraud, so
> that motivated aspiring cartographers are not tempted to give away their
> souls for free. I could understand that they sell it, but giving it to
> Google for free is a bit too much - we must tell them. I'm pretty sure
> that good geographic data available to anyone for free will do more for
> the least developed communities than a 50k USD grant.
>
> I answered this piece at ReadWriteWeb and I suggest that you keep an eye
> for opportunities to answer this sort of propaganda against libre mapping :
>
> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_announces_map_contest_50k_for_adding_school.php#comment-175013
>

You can add this link in terms of moral high ground:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/climate-tools-for-copenhagen-and-beyond.html
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