Oh, my head hurts. I wasn’t around last weekend to do the roundup so Nick agreed to do it. I mailed him suggesting it was a fairly quiet week. “have you been following Legal-talk?” he asked. “Better subscribe. ” I said. Big mistake! It’s not the quantity of mailings that’s the problem, its the passion, quality & general level of understanding. This is where Baz the Blogger’s head really starts to hurt, I’ll keep it brief:
There are three main debates going on at the moment “Is the share-alike road navigable“, “Moving up the stack“, and “The big license debate“. I don’t pretend to do them justice in this one-sentence-per-subject summary so if the subjects interest you and you want to join in, please take a look at the debate. Thanks to David Groom, SteveC, and Tom Chance for starting off these particular threads.
The share-alike road in one sentence is this. Can the license to OSM data be made so that the people that use and enhance OSM data are obliged to make their enhancements available to OSM. To make this concrete, if someone took the OSM data and, for a particular map they placed street names at ‘good’ locations, they would have to return those locations to OSM. There are also other debates on licensing for derivative works. “The big license debate” discusses the pros and cons of CC vs. PD licenses. Should the data be made public domain – a complete free-for-all, or will CC licensing work? One issue with making the data public domain is that everyone that contributed must state that their work is in the public domain. “Moving up the stack” covers whether OSM should just stick to the data layer or move up in some way – afraid this one made my head really hurt!
It is good to see that the FAQ keeps getting updated. For example, people are naturally keen to see the edits and additions they make appear on the slippy map. Now you keen peeps can now go to the FAQ to find how to get your freshly edited area updated quickly… then clear your cache, have a nice relaxing meal & come back to see the results of your hard labours (on a good day 🙂 ).
Something weird happened with a question by Franciso Santos posted on “Tagging urban streets” – whats the tagging scheme for roads when you get in the centre of a city. Plenty of discussion to agree the scope of the problem, then Mike Collinson proposed something that seemed to be agreed. Wow! Take a look – it doesn’t happen that often.
It seems to have been a busy week for applications. Or should I say nacient application-lets. OJW announced an atlas generation programme. Richard Fairhust announced a test version of Potlatch, a flash-based editor for OSM data and again OJW let us know about an easy way to generate map jpegs on the fly here, surely these should have a CC license logo on them? Or are they derived works – oh, my head is starting to hurt!
Like most (all?) distributed collaborative projects, OSM is discussed at many levels: on the mailing lists (some that we summarise here, legal, talk, dev, party ) the wiki and IRC. There’s only one thing to say about the IRC channel #osm…… “There be sxpert’s” 😉
Fancy a trip to Spain? Iván (who I’m sure was in rehab) is organising a mapping party in Madrid – why not join in? Oh, and be careful mapping in China.
And finally, you know you’ve got Obsessive Compulsive Open Street Mapping Disorder when “…going to see relatives suddenly sounds interesting…” – too close Dutch! And it just goes on…
Enjoy!
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By Barry Crabtree
Barry! Thanks! Caught up on the lists after a week away, now ready for more