![]() ![]() Where we had to do with a volunteer sysadmin for over a decade (2), setting up a map database is not that difficult for such a big organization who can hire a team right away. They have access to resources we can only dream of. The biggest winners would be the closed source mapping applications run by big corpos, such as Google Maps, Apple Maps and Bing Maps. They don’t have a specialized community around them, and they would see their road network and POI data going stale, slowly forcing them out of the market. The biggest victims of this move would be the OSM-based general purpose consumer applications (OsmAnd,, Organic Maps, …). So, even though the direct move of using CC0 for the OSM-data can be considered “more open”, it would in the end be a big net negative for Open Data. Tooling and software would become just as fragmented, killing the quality of the software too. The result would be that more work should be done in total, for way worse data quality as the data would not be integrated any more. I’ve seen countless similar projects, but all focused on a small scope, all in varying states, such as Open Benches, Camper sites, Slipways, charging stations AEDs, and then I’m not mentioning the thousands of maps on municipality websites.Īll of them would grab a partial copy of OSM with only the data that they are interested in and try to wall them off and build their own community around it, effectively splintering OSM-contributors into thousands of niche communities. Every actor out there, big and small, would grab a copy of OSM and go their own way with it. Consider, hypothetically, that every contributor who ever made a change would agree to convert all their previous contributions to CC0, what would happen (1)?Ī data run would happen. Yet, I’m still convinced that using a CC0-license for OSM would kill the project instantly. I’ve been in many meetings with interested parties where this licence proved to be puzzling to the uninitiated or where the share-alike licence was outright incompatible with their goals even though these goals were to publish open data from the government! The share-alike-license is often incompatible with the obligated public-domain-license they sometimes have to use. ![]() ![]() I’m not blind to some of the drawbacks that this approach has. These licences force us to unite under a common banner, to put the community above the individual. On an individual scale, this contribution is negligible yet all those little drops become a huge river together. I argue that this is one of the big reasons that OSM has become the successful project in this space, and I argue that two other important projects are successful thanks to a similar contagious licence: Wikipedia uses Creative Commons with Attribution and Share-alike, the Linux Kernel uses the GNU General Public Licence which is share alike similarly.Īll this serves a specific purpose: it binds people using the data or tools to contribute back their little bit of help. I’m glossing over some of the technical details, but the spirit is that the licence is contagious. Changes to the data have to be shared again under the same licence.This means that everyone can use OSM-data for all purposes (including commercial purposes), but they have to honour two obligations: A bit of historyĪs you all are aware, OpenStreetMap-data is republished under the Open Database Licence. The means to this end is called ‘Bing Map Builder’. It tries to capture away precisely what makes OSM strong: the contributors. However, recently, a new participant has entered the ecosystem with parasitic intents. All this activity and diversity strengthens us as a global community. Motivations range from the most mundane reasons up till political activism.Īnd that’s fine. Our strength is the unison in this goal, even though everyone pursues this differently, through different technological means and for different motivations. However, most of these things miss the crucial point of what OSM is: a community a group of people that are working together on mapping the world in an Open Data way and building related tools with Open Source. For example, they complain that we didn’t implement Bézier curves yet (we don’t need them), or that the data model is stale (it isn’t, new tagging appears every day), that the main OSM.org website doesn’t have some feature and isn’t on par with Google Maps (that’s by intent) or that AI will make the entire manual mapping space obsolete, in “just another ten years time”. Often times, these essays complain about some trivial things which are, in the end, not that important. It is a long-standing tradition that every now and then, a member of the OpenStreetMap-community posts that OSM is in trouble. ![]()
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