OpenStreetMap
Guess that's it then for my Huntsville, Alabama contributions
Posted by cainmark on 18 April 2011 in English.Well. that was fun.
Took too much time from other things I should have been doing,but I'm proud of my Creative Commons By-Share Alike data I've helped to provide for bicyclists and pedestrians in the Huntsville, Alabama, USA area. Even wrote an article about it last years for the local Alternative monthly paper here encouraging others to contribute. I've done a lot. Most of it well, some of it not-so-well. The beauty of it is that anyone else can add and correct any bugs or changes, so good luck to them.
OSM is superior to other maps I've used for POIs rendered on the maps, so I'll still be using it and the fantastic OpenCycleMap, but I won't be contributing anymore. Unless there's a huge fork that has a license I'm comfortable with.
2 issues mainly: CC BY-SA, yes, that would mean the whole book using a CC-BY-SA map would also need to be CC-BY-SA. I have a hard time believing this was even a question. It's stated right there in the license. And the execrable "non-transferable" rights clause.
A 3rd issue is I really dislike how this license change was brought about by OSM foundation members and not the whole OSM mapping community. That stinks of the kind of commercial bureacracy that FSF, GPL, and CC were formed to prevent and fight against.
It was an amazing project and I was glad to have contributed.
Discussion
Comment from z-dude on 18 April 2011 at 06:31
Yeah. I would have preferred a BSD license. Total freedom.
Comment from Zverik on 18 April 2011 at 09:42
And which license would you prefer (since you don't like ODbL and aware that CC-BY-SA does not work for geodata)? And if you think OSMF should have asked your opinion, why didn't you come to them and state your concerns? There was enough time to do that.
Comment from chriscf on 18 April 2011 at 18:57
Call a doctor. That's an olfactory hallucination. OSMF is not a commercial bureaucracy, it's a body run by members of the community at large, and anyone is free to join. It's not an elite high council (though many of the big names are members). There's no "you must be this tall to ride" sign. As much as I hate the warm fuzzy feeling that these people like to spread, the Foundation is the community, and vice versa. There's no separating the two, and any sense of "us and them" is entirely misplaced.
Comment from JohnSmith on 24 April 2011 at 14:38
cainmark all I can say is I feel your pain, it's sad OSM-F is so intent of killing off it's community. Hopefully something much better will rise out of the ashes otherwise everyone will probably end up migrating to Google Map Maker, they offer more or less the same terms but produce much more useful apps.
Comment from cainmark on 7 May 2011 at 23:06
CC-BY-SA works fine for data. Maps can be copyrighted as so many commercial mapmakers proved over the years.
Comment from chriscf on 7 June 2011 at 00:29
Maps can be copyrighted because maps are not factual. Maps are expressions of facts. Facts and ideas cannot be protected by copyright, only expressions can. In some places a collection of facts may be protected this way. The USA isn't one of them.