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On hindsight, OSM choosing the copyleft ODbL (which I then agreed with) was the correct move. It prevents the likes of Google and now Overture from taking OSM data and running away with it with nary an acknowledgement or attribution to the hardworking OSM community. Even now, the companies *cough*Facebook*cough* that founded overture are testing the limits of ODbL with things like inadequate attribution. 2/3

The only reason why Overture exists now is because OSM is now good enough and fit-for-use. Without OSM, companies would still have been disparate silos a la Google, Navteq, and TeleAtlas. 3/3

@seav but there were tons of people (including me) that exactly drew this path concerning the very restrictive ODbL.

OSM is nothing without its community. And there is no value in the "they can take all our data" ... That was true in 2012 and even more today.

@flohoff @seav Google has their community of map makers too. Waze has a vibrant community too, so having the ODbL helps to prevent shattering the community

@pietervdvn @seav ODbL ist a simple refusal to open interchange of data. The pain of this license has been growing since 2012 and it will continue to cause more pain.

And I haven't seen any Google or Waze community at the scale of OSM. It might be okay for the US but try cycling with the above mentioned.

@flohoff @seav hmmm, I don't agree. Under a public domain license, we would have every big and small company forking of, trying to start their own community. There are plenty of examples like this already, but we'd have even more then, but they are starting to fuse.

And why would people bother to not use Google Maps, if they could take whatever they needed? It would always have been better then OSM.

Also: I do think that the casual amount of google maps contributions is far underestimated.

@flohoff @seav Btw: the cycleway-data in GMaps might be bad, but their POI data is way broader. Not always qualitative, but way more. I'm sure this is in a big part due to their 'local guides'

@flohoff @seav well, we don't know what amount is crawled and what amount is gathered. I'd love to see sources on that! But there are non, afaik