I very much agree. In particular i have been pointing out the insulting and disrespectful nature of second rate attributions - that is people producing other attributions (most frequently for themselves) significantly more prominently or accessible than for OSM.
There are of course corporate interests who try to milk OSM for all it's worth while maximizing their short term ROI and not giving back any more than they absolutely have to. That is natural and expected but it is up to us to define what "they absolutely have to". If we have and express a clear view on what we require in terms of attribution and we are willing to actually demand this from data users this would not be an issue. This ultimately is an economic problem and not a legal problem. This however leads me to what i perceive to be the real problem here. The OSM community does not really speak with one voice on this matter even if you exclude the corporate interests in your analysis. During the license change discussion it became clear that there is a significant fraction of the OSM community who would have preferred it if OSM had adopted a CC0 or similar license without either share-alike or a hard attribution requirement. It has been argued many times that this would not have been a wise decision and that OSM would not be anywhere near where it is today without a license requiring share-alike and attribution. The fraction of the OSM community who dislike the share-alike and attribution requirements is much smaller today than it was right after the license change probably. There are quite a few prominent community members who have expressed they changed their opinion on this for example. But we also have quite a few people who are still convinced that OSM would be better off with a more liberal license and who would gladly change it if there was a majority for it and who in the meantime would be in favour of interpreting the attribution and share-alike requirements as weakly as possible. This sub-surface schism in the OSM community, which is of course further nutured by corporate interests, is IMO the real problem and you could see the inproper attribution from data users as merely a symptom of this. What OSMF activity since the license change on this front, in particular with the community guidelines, has tried to do is to pave over this conflict by interpreting the ODbL as leniently as possible without this resulting in gross inconsistencies. And in a way it is understandable if coporate data users use this as a basis to try to take this a step further. The way to solve this would IMO be for the OSM community to actually in substance accept the idea of the ODbL and the social contract among mappers and between mappers and data users it imples as a core component of the constitution of the project. So far i think this can only be said for the fundamental idea of open data in general but not for the idea of hard attribution and share-alike requirements. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
