To be clear: I would very much welcome it if the board states that they welcome activities from the OSM community pushing organizational OSM data users for following the license and supporting people organizing pressure on them to do so. But from past experience with board members articulating themselves on this kind of matter i would not expect much here though (but would be happy to be positively surprised).
One particular case i have pointed out on several occasions is the matter of second rate attributions. A clear statement that if anyone is credited in any way for a map using OSM data OSM contributors need to be attributed with at least the same prominence and visibility would be immensely helpful. Clear statements are important because nothing is more annoying than data users attempting to weasel around attribution requirements. In my experience when contacting data users about insufficient attribution at least 2/3 of the communication is dealing with petty attempts at bargaining for less attribution. > I don't know what your position is in these matters; but > actually cataloguing license violations, sending the appropriate > legal nastygrams to the appropriate legal entities in the appropriate > countries and all that, is certainly something that can occupy one > employee full time - an employee where the OSMF would likely depend > on corporate members like Facebook to pay their salary. So we have to > be careful with what we demand from the OSMF. That publishing something on the internet inevitably results in people ripping you off (including in particular big corporations and organizations) and that you can spend more time (and could possibly even make more money) pursuing such than by actually producing things is essentially a fact of life. The situation for OSM is a bit different though since allowing others on a large scale to ignore the ODbL essentially nullifies the social contract of OSM and leads to the project loosing contributors (all those who consider their contributions to be contingent to attribution and share-alike being given back to them by data users). I think making sure that this does not happen should be done through volunteer work but the OSMF could do quite a lot without investing a lot of work to support this simply by making clear that the OSMF stands firmly behind any OSM community members who act on such cases (in a friendly and supportive way to first time offenders but with firm pressure on unregenerate repeat offenders). There are tons of very simple things the OSMF could do to to indicate their support. Removing data users with no proper attribution from https://welcome.openstreetmap.org/about-osm-community/consumers/ for example. No one should underestimage the amount of pressure the OSM community could put on large data users who don't abide by the license. I already indicated this is pure theory but how long do you think it would take Facebook to become a model ODbL data user if all active OSM contributors would * cease using Facebook * stop any cooperation with Facebook within the project * revert any edits made by mappers working for Facebook or for projects being financed by Facebook? IMO ultimately key is that everyone internalizes that being lenient on sustained license violations is not a way to support adoption of OSM as a data source but primarily a way to alienate huge parts of the contributor base. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
