I've been a little selective in quoting your message but I think you have correctly identified the split. Germany and the UK with high mapper density are probably for the new license and dumping the older data other parts of the world that don't have the luxury of such a high density of mappers and rely on partnerships with government agencies etc and importing data are finding it much more difficult.
The US at the moment is grappling of what to with the problem of the new whatever data for 2010. Replacing data is difficult, what do you do about the tags? Because of slight differences in the data points of interest can end up on the other side of the road. Canada's current CANVEC data available for import is very nice, road networks complete with names and house numbers in many places. Starting clean is actually a very attractive idea, you lose the traffic_lights on the map but what you have is clean. All the roads have the correct names for example. Historically the new world has taken European ideas and modified them to work in a different environment. Guns used to be made by craftsmen in Europe but in the new world lacking the craftsmen they used an assembly line breaking skilled work down into less skilled tasks. The same with mapping, we don't have the problem of government sources wanting to charge for or place restrictions on GIS data in fact one problem that has been identified in Canada is we don't have the manpower to absorb all the data people would like us to import. We do have a problem with finding enough mappers on the ground though. I seriously think there will be a split, and it will be along the lines of thank you OSM we are very grateful for the ideas and the software infrastructure but in order to get a working map we need something different. I would prefer not to see a split but unless some one comes up with a way to address the concerns then I think it will happen. Perhaps one answer might be Europe is licensed one way and the rest of the world another? Dunno. Cheerio John > Realistically I would carve the map up into tiles then as soon as a > > tile got to 50% new license then block users adding data under the old > > license to that tile. > > That works great where youve got tiles full of lots of data, but what > about in regional areas? If a mapper wants to contribute data, is OSM > not interested in that data, because the person doesnt wish to accept a > licence? I see this as having the effect of halving the amount of > contributed data, after we've alerady wiped out half the data that was > there in the first place, which to me sounds like someone slowly trying > to bring down OSM from the inside. > > > Some parts of the world will be ready to move to the new license > > faster than others. > > And what about those places that dont move to the new licence? Do we > simply tell users in those places 'sorry, you either accept our > restrictive licence, or you accept google/yahoo/etc's restrictive > licence'? Again, this sort of opinion seems like someone trying to > split OSM apart, from the inside. > > > I don't see any one coming up with a list of requirements for > > different users of our data and how we keep them happy as we > > transition. > > I dont think there is interest in doing that, from the powers-that-be. > Many 'users of our data' have been expressing concerns for many months, > and the only responses Ive seen have been basically 'shut up', 'tell > someone else who cares' or 'its been decided, get over it'. With this > sort of attitude, is it any wonder that groups that own data are > becoming wary of dealing with the OSM project. > > While its great that some small parts of the world have a density of > mappers adequate enough to map local regions extensively, in large parts > of the world, this is simply not really practical. Compare mapping the > highways in England or France to mapping the highways of Russia, Canada > or Australia. > > David > > > >
_______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
