Courtney <courtney.william...@gmail.com> writes: > We also now have a new datapoint for our research. It will be interesting > to get a sense of how many within the community have principled objections > to proprietary software compared to members of the community who are > looking at useability, localization, and/or accessibility as well as open > sourcing in their choices of software.
Asking about whether people care about accessibilty in this context is a bit of a red herring. It's like complaining that someone who objects on moral grounds to a group going around stealing food from stores to feed the hungry must not care about people who don't have enough food. Labeling the current pushback as objection to proprietary software is missing half the point. However, that half is certainly valid. The other half is separate, which is that many people in OSM believe that they should be able to fully participate -- without being second class in any way -- without having to enter into a contract with any company, or having data about them captured and/or handled by a company, except perhaps one acting on behalf of OSMF under a non-disclosure agreement. For example, if OSMF hired the same kind of company that does employee satisfaction surveys for large employers, under NDA, then the "proprietary software" objection would still (almost certainly) be on the table, but the "user is asked to sign a contract with an invasive advertising company and have their data handled by an invasive advertising company under terms other than NDA" would be mostly avoided. As for the ideology of open source: it's probably more helpful to talk about Free Software, which is the original concept for freedoms for the user, as "open source" is a term with a softer tone that amounts to the same thing. Free Software respects the freedom of users to run the software, to study and modify the software, to redistribute unmodified copies, and to redistribute modified versions. OSM is not strictly a free software project, but it is an open data project (which is not "Free Data" but that would be the same thing), with "data" instead of "software". It can't be strictly concluded that Free Software will be respectful of users, in that the software when run will act in the user's interest rather than the interests of the authors. However, it's mostly true in practice. It also can't be concluded that proprietary software will misbehave (acting for the authors and against the users), but the track record of most zero-cost proprietary software is quite dreadful. Overall, you are both running into a principled objection that proprietary software is not ok to use, and a belief that asking people to volunteer to be surveilled as a condition of community participation is not ok. A number of us see the second part as a moral bright line, not a detail. I see it as inconsistent to support open data without having at least some significant bias against using proprietary software (for the open data project). I also see it as inconsistent not to object to asking users to sign contracts with surveillance companies. We wouldn't for instance, be ok with "you have to agree to google's terms to get OSM data" or "you have to report your name and location every minute while routing using OSM data" -- which while sounding bizare is basically the google maps experience for most. I view it as regrettable that more of the community does not understand and agree with these objections. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
