Good morning, All. I am one of the representative of OSM/PocketGis team. At this moment we have 70+ active members of the both projects (OSM and PocketGis) simultaneously http://tinyurl.com/y3cotlt . We operate mainly in Moscow region, but we have active memebers throughout the whole western Russia - and most of them were attracted by the conglomerate of OSM and PocketGis. We have hosted a separate bug-tracker http://tinyurl.com/y6x4xeu for those members of PocketGis community, who for some reason can not change/add data to OSM database theirselves. We also participate with OSM data in our local tests, for example http://tinyurl.com/y4hzvb5 .
First af all I would like to state that nearly 80% of the Komяpa's speech has nothing to do with real facts that took place. That is more like a snapshot of his emonional comprehention of the matter. That is why I forewarn you all from judging about the real reason that made us (pocketgis-osm team) raise some special aspects of "military" questions. That were not us who raised the question in general, but that was our team that tried to underline (during the first week of voting) the real (or even one of the few... or the only) problem that can prevent the whole OSM from being officially accepted or recognised in Russia. Oh, even not really recognised (OSM does not need any official papers or similar - I explain it in the next section). We have worked out the justification and proposed it for our team - those who use PocketGis and really add data to OSM database (those registered on wiki realy do contriburte to OSM). And there were some of them that did not agree with our justification. And that is normal - everyone can have their opinion. Furthermore just about a half of OSM/PocketGis participants have really voted. I would like to make it clear that OSM/PocketGis had no intention to organise a "flash mob" and to artifficially make our proposal win on the voting since in the opposite case we would have engaged 20000+ members of PocketGis community http://tinyurl.com/yyd79ox (registration needed). Our legal analisys shows, that adding data to OSM in Russia in general by individuals without intention to gain profit seems legal without any license. Licensing for mapping is obligatory and possible for organisations only. So that can not be the matter of deleting "all Russia" from OSM "if OSM were to respect national laws". The main problem (and almost the only problem) stressed by our team is that publishing (giving away) a composition of geographical position (dislocation) + "military owned" is likely to be considered as a violation of federal law on state secret. That can ruin all our efforts to give OSM in Russia the ability to be a real competitor to commercial mapping, which has a realtime and extremely flexible editing tools and plenty of possible applications. If the story comes out to the level of secret service and finish with their own decision to ban such information, that is likely that FSS (ФСБ, ex-KGB) may force the internet providers to limit access to OSM servers' IPs and domain names... it is a matter of just a telephone call. I realy doubt that in UK gathering and mapping (say making public coordinates) secret and top secret by law objects. Moreover, in general it is often not possible to distinguish each object with a wall or fence around it even with a building with a plate "control checkpoint" or "military unit #####" on it as an object owned by military, so the only "absolute truth on ground" about it is that that is just a wall and access is prohibited ("no"). Giving the wall tag landuse=military that stands for "military owned" in Map features will be just a guess of the author, even if he has seen armed man behind the fence. Let me return back to the possible consequences of giving the coordinates of secret objects in Russia. Everyone can read lots of news about what is happening in China with Google: site banning and similar actions. Another example, now in Russia: a few months ago the largest Russian torrent tracker's domain name (torrents.ru) deligation was withdrawn by the registrator on a basis of a single request of the Prosecutors. Still another example: Google is forced to delete a video with 100000+ views after a single expression of discontent of a member of the State Parliament. And that is all that happens. It seems to me that this little local rule of excluding landuse=military on the territory of Russian Federation will give OSM in Russia clear chanses not to be negatively influenced by state officials. And that will let it be freely developed and legally used. -- Best regards, Eugene Iline
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