FOSS4G OpenStreetMap Slides September 30
Incase you missed the talk, here are the slides:
To accompany the slides, here’s a condensed version:
Some guys with GPS units on vans donated their traces to some other guys who made a collaborative map. This was cool, so lots of people joined in, collecting lots of traces, making nice maps and writing software tools to edit the map. The project is now growing very quickly and a Foundation has been set up, which does things like fundraising and organising conferences.
The most valuable thing to OSM are the people. But people are often disparate and hard to organise. For OSM to work the people need to be motivated by incentives other than money. The people won’t do stuff unless its fun, they trust the organisation and they see the results of the hard work.
Geo-data in the UK is very good, but very expensive and is sold by the Ordnance Survey. OSM’s data is not as good as the OS’s data, but its free. As OSM’s data gets better, the OS’s data will get cheaper. When OSM’s data is good enough for 80% of uses, proprietary vendors will be forced to compete on a margin of 20% of use cases. This will lead to more innovations in the mapping industry and more price cuts.
Some people say that OSM’s data is crap. Others just get on with making free maps.
Richard Oct 17
Nice Presentation, I liked the graph comparing mapping to Linux and Microsoft, good explanation. By the way, you’re link to my blog is to my old address. I’m on richmaninjapan.blogspot.com now, not that I post to it much any more!
bob thing Oct 25
others grumble that the licensing is crap and are saddened that it is an idea with so much potential that is being put to waste
Nick Oct 26
Bob: ‘others grumble that the licensing is crap and are saddened that it is an idea with so much potential that is being put to waste’
Please elaborate. By ‘crap’ do you mean, ‘doesn’t do what I want it to?’
bob thing Nov 5
Well much is made of the fact that the data is free (as in americans rather than beer) but the license that has been chosen not only stops people selling on which is prolly all that it intends but also doing things like combining it with other data without the owners of that data giving up all their rights (despite the fact that they may be willing otherwise to allow you to use the data freely). It narrows down the actual usefulness of it quite significantly and I think its pretty hypocritical to add such restrictions. Obviously you don’t want some company taking it and making money from your hard work but at the same time if you are gonna lock it up then what is the point collecting the data in the first place? Its a great idea to have free mapping of the world around us (why OS maps arn’t already when we pay taxes I don’t know) but replacing one set of restrictions with another seems a bit daft to me and a lost opportunity when people are obviously willing to donate their time to put the data together.
Nick Nov 5
bob: ‘license that has been chosen not only stops people selling on which is prolly all that it intends but also doing things like combining it with other data without the owners of that data giving up all their rights (despite the fact that they may be willing otherwise to allow you to use the data freely).’
Nothing stops you from selling OSM data. Where did you get that idea? Have you heard of CloudMade? (I am a director).
bob thing Nov 23
So why isn’t it public domain then? You arn’t disallowing commercial use directly, you are just making it unviable.
Something that disallows people to add worth and distribute the combined thing on their own terms, selling it or not, means that really you are restricting the use to people who offer a direct service on the data (what a coincidence that is exactly what you do
).
Nick Nov 23
‘So why isn’t it public domain then? You arn’t disallowing commercial use directly, you are just making it unviable.’
I’m not disallowing anything - OpenStreetMap is a community project, its the community’s decision to license the data CC-by-SA.
In what way is commercial use of OSM data unviable? Nestoria don’t think that its unviable and netiher do CloudMade. A license like CC-by-SA just means that people have to be innovative. Its not good enough just to bundle some OSM data together into a pretty book and slap © on it, people have to think how they can add value to OSM data. It seems a bizzare argument to say that because something is PD licensing can have worth added to it but something that is virally licenses cannot have worth added to it seems bizzare. Redhat and Cannonical seems to be able to add worth to GPL software and Apple can add worth to BSD software - you just have to go about things in different ways.
‘…you are restricting use to people who offer a direct service on the data?’
I really don’t see what you mean here? What indirect services are being restricted? Here’s one you can have for free: Take OSM’s data and David Earl’s geo-coder, slap it into a web-service and charge for commmercial use. Find someone who knows a lot about marketing and/or sales and give them %20 of future profits on your service. Go to some GIS industry conferences and tout your wares. You would be profitable in no-time.
bob thing Nov 24
“I’m not disallowing anything - OpenStreetMap is a community project, its the community’s decision to license the data CC-by-SA.”
The way I understood it a lot of the community did/do want it to be public domain but key members have overuled and said that it has to use the viral license. (plus a fair few just go along with the status quo without really thinking about the consequences).
“I really don’t see what you mean here? What indirect services are being restricted?”
Its all very well charging for services like you mention, however you can’t take that data and some other data that you’ve collected, bundle it together and stop people from copying and selling it how they please. So you never get to the next stage of someone taking that bundle and adding some other data to it. As you say, people can probably make a short term profit making a direct service, they can’t make a long term addition to its worth and protect it. So it will only ever get mixed with easily obtainable data that people dont mind losing control of. Companies that go to a lot of effort to collect info and need to protect that data in order to recoup the cost of collection will be unable to add to it.
So in the end rather than promote data sharing it stifles inovation of use.