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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'

@pietervdvn @seav IMHO there is NO poi data in the Map data. It's all basically web crawled and maintained by the userbase.

So it's a little unfair comparing a web crawled poi set with a manually audited one.

@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

@flohoff @seav Waze _did_ build a comunity with locked-in data

@pietervdvn @seav You mean they found app users and crowdsourced statistical data? Like Strava? I wouldn't count that as a community. In OSM we have like thousands of discussions in parallel in the Forum, Changesets, Notes about how to make the map better, dispute stuff etc. People communicate with each other in masses.

@flohoff @seav that's indeed part of their source, but they have actual users contributing road geometries as well.

To get back to your first point, what is the harm ODbL causes according to you?

@pietervdvn @seav Complexity? We have like twice a week diskussions on the Mailingliste about what people ARE actually allowed to do and what now. We have thousands of websites who do not care about attribution anyway and the OSMF is not very interesting on going after those (Which I think is good). So what's the point in a complex license, prohibiting usage for major players, making it complex for medium ones, which in the end the small ignore?

@pietervdvn @seav it's a legally overengineered solution satisfying the jealous and squinting mappers of 2012.

I have been socialised with the GPL and Linux. Have a look at the GCC vs LLVM case. Two compilers, one with GPL and copyright assignment and the other with a lot more liberal license.

@seav @pietervdvn but isnt it a bit like calling "Google captcha" users a community ?

@flohoff @pietervdvn apples and oranges. Look, I wish the people who contribute to Waze in my country would instead contribute to OSM but I wouldn't begrudge them by saying they're a fake community.

@simon @seav it would be interesting to see an extract for map data whose whole history had the public domain box ticked. I'm guessing the amount of usable data would be minimal and mostly buildings etc. that get added once and left as is.

@InsertUser @seav Well you would have to remove everything that was added/corrected via non-compatible (with PD) sources too, it would make the licence change look like a kids birthday party in comparison.