> Within the frame of Prototype Fund round 15 (March 2024 to August 2024), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research sponsored Tobias Zwick to work on StreetComplete for iOS (see progress report)
I was curious what they're currently sponsoring; here's another neat OSM project: <a href="https://osm2world.org/demo/?lat=52.5239396&lon=13.4104859&radius=1828.67&alpha=0.953&beta=0.755" rel="nofollow">https://osm2world.org/demo/?lat=52.5239396&lon=13.4104859&ra...
The current demo doesn't seem to cover many places worldwide, but what is there is really neat! To me this already looks better than modern city sim games, because they never seem to get the scale right, among other things.
Not sure what's stopping them from covering more places, since the idea presumably is to generate these tiles from existing OSM data. And in fact one of the easiest things to do with StreetComplete is add the height and type of a building.
Usually government data is CC0 or public domain while OSM is not (maybe Germany is different?), so I thought they'd be allergic to OSM's licensing. OSM actually has a lot of problems ingesting data b/c a lot of map data can't be relicensed under their license.
Ironically.. you can't contribute map data that requires attribution to OSM... even though they require attribution..
It's a great project.. but I think they really messed up the licensing in a misguided effort to make the project viral. Maybe trying to emulate Wikipedia. But text and map data are just fundamentally very different. It's really unfortunate. I hope an alternative emerged eventually
I would say biggest issue with licensing comes from clear attribution being problematic at the scale of OSM not the virality or relicensing problems. That and OSM aiming for being squeaky clean, far away from any ambiguity in terms of third party data licensing.
It is simply impractical to attribute all the sources anywhere in UI or printed copies of map. And whether an attribution hidden somewhere deep in wiki is considered acceptable is grey zone.
The fact that OSM themselves want attributions is another reasons why they have high standards for what's considered an attribution which they can't achieve for third party data sources.
In case of software License.txt and Help/About is considered standard practices. But that doesn't necessarily translate to other mediums of copyrighted work. Something like books or research papers have their own generally accepted practices of how attributions are handled. For maps digital and physical text in the corner is often used practice. You can see it even for something like a building plan posted next to construction site, listing additional map sources used for preparing the drawing. So it's not exactly unique invention by OSM. Back to comparison with software, software can't exactly be printed out so the concerns about attribution are different. Also software licenses typically require listing including a copy of license text not just attribution , which is simply impossible outside separate file or dedicated UI.
In practice the OSM aiming for better than good and thousands of unverified contributors being uncontrollable lands it somewhere in the middle. But if they aimed for barely acceptable all the contributors would definitely push the bar bellow legally acceptable.
On the topic of government data, CC-BY is also common which is somewhat problematic. But more often they have no idea under what license they are releasing their data. They come up with complicated schemes of metadata, which never gets properly filled or parsed, thus resulting in conflicting information about license being used. And if you ask them to clarify they will just say, "yes yes it's open data you can reuse it", with the government employee having no understanding about differences between various licenses and that not all open data is equal.
I understand that there is precedent and there is a logic to it... but to me it rubs me the wrong way. I think text and code are not very analogous situations. If I think in terms of software licenses..:
- I sort of respect the copyleft ethos. You put out a thing with the understand everything it touches is also going to be openly available. I think attribution isn't really part of the central idea there.
- I also respect the MIT/BSD style thing where you're just putting stuff out there in the public domain and it's part of the corpus of human knowledge. You leave your mark so to speak.
The middle ground of "You can use this but you gotta promote our service and stamp our name on it" just feels icky. I don't want to contribute to that. I feel I'm helping OSM the organization and.. I don't know them .. are they good stewards of the data I'm giving them? Are they going to be good stewards in 10 years? Hopefully that kinda makes sense? I guess the same can be said for Wikipedia, but Wikipedia for better or worse is very siloed. You have to attribute stuff you copy from Wiki but ..
A: Realistically nobody is actually copying wiki articles other than lazy high school students. It's just not very reusable outside of Wikipedia
B: This is more of a plagiarism issue. It encourages people to disclose it's not their own words (this is not an issue with maps.. nobody thinks you surveyed your city to draw the map)
If Wiki became CC0 tomorrow nothing would really change. If you needed to fork Wiki and put an attribution in the footer, it'd be very innocuous..
I don't get why you consider MIT/BSD fine when both of them have "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." but when OSM does the same it somehow becomes "you gotta promote our service".
> For practical reasons we require that users of OpenStreetMap data attribute the project as a whole and we in turn provide attribution to third parties via the "Contributor" pages. Licences and terms of use that require attribution of the third party data source directly on derived works are incompatible.
"require attribution of the third party data source directly on derived works" is exactly what OSM requires. It's hypocrisy of a sorts
> It's a great project.. but I think they really messed up the licensing in a misguided effort to make the project viral.
OSM's sharealike provision has never been about making the project "viral". Free map data is enough to do that by itself.
OSM's sharealike provision is, and always has been, unambiguously aimed at stopping bigcos killing the project by scooping up the map data then contributing nothing back - the scenario where Schmoogle Maps takes all OSM's footpath data, combines it with their own motor-centric, sensor-fuelled dataset to create the one map to rule them all, and thereby attracts the flow of new contributors that OSM needs to survive.
The subtext seems to be a hostility towards people making money from what you've shared.. which I find sort of baffling - but is very on-brand for the general anti-capitalist sentiments in the memesphere. People building on your work feels like something to be celebrated, but I guess it's a difference of opinion. I'm just generally skeptical that this would be "killing the project" at all.. it feels like it'd be the other way around? If OSM data were for instance used by Google and Apple Maps.. it feels like it'd just have made it more foundational and would get people even more excited to contribute. It'd be the world's central repository of map data everyone builds off of.. like the Debian of maps. Instead it's a parochial project for map nerds.
Can you imagine if GIMP has a similar policy to watermark all it's output with a "Made my GIMP!" in an effort to "attracts the flow of new contributors" and to make it hard for people to build a product with it?
Oh interesting! So they manage to not watermark their maps. OSM seems to heavily imply you should watermark, but as I understand it, it's not strictly required
Sadly not always the case. The Irish government went with CCBY 4.0 as the primary license which causes some compatibility issues with OSM due to specific clauses. :/
Fnoord · · focus · HN ↗
> Within the frame of Prototype Fund round 15 (March 2024 to August 2024), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research sponsored Tobias Zwick to work on StreetComplete for iOS (see progress report)
And NLnet.
morsch · · focus · HN ↗
The current demo doesn't seem to cover many places worldwide, but what is there is really neat! To me this already looks better than modern city sim games, because they never seem to get the scale right, among other things.
Not sure what's stopping them from covering more places, since the idea presumably is to generate these tiles from existing OSM data. And in fact one of the easiest things to do with StreetComplete is add the height and type of a building.
alper · · focus · HN ↗
Dig1t · · focus · HN ↗
toomuchtodo · · focus · HN ↗
wafflemaker · · focus · HN ↗
toomuchtodo · · focus · HN ↗
Gigachad · · focus · HN ↗
geokon · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_Compatibility" rel="nofollow">https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_Compatibility
Ironically.. you can't contribute map data that requires attribution to OSM... even though they require attribution..
It's a great project.. but I think they really messed up the licensing in a misguided effort to make the project viral. Maybe trying to emulate Wikipedia. But text and map data are just fundamentally very different. It's really unfortunate. I hope an alternative emerged eventually
matkoniecz · · focus · HN ↗
Sadly, this is very often not true at all.
In some cases you are unable to legally get parts of law without paying for it. For example where law mandates following proprietary standards.
Government funded data creation is very often entirely proprietary.
Karliss · · focus · HN ↗
It is simply impractical to attribute all the sources anywhere in UI or printed copies of map. And whether an attribution hidden somewhere deep in wiki is considered acceptable is grey zone.
The fact that OSM themselves want attributions is another reasons why they have high standards for what's considered an attribution which they can't achieve for third party data sources.
In case of software License.txt and Help/About is considered standard practices. But that doesn't necessarily translate to other mediums of copyrighted work. Something like books or research papers have their own generally accepted practices of how attributions are handled. For maps digital and physical text in the corner is often used practice. You can see it even for something like a building plan posted next to construction site, listing additional map sources used for preparing the drawing. So it's not exactly unique invention by OSM. Back to comparison with software, software can't exactly be printed out so the concerns about attribution are different. Also software licenses typically require listing including a copy of license text not just attribution , which is simply impossible outside separate file or dedicated UI.
In practice the OSM aiming for better than good and thousands of unverified contributors being uncontrollable lands it somewhere in the middle. But if they aimed for barely acceptable all the contributors would definitely push the bar bellow legally acceptable.
On the topic of government data, CC-BY is also common which is somewhat problematic. But more often they have no idea under what license they are releasing their data. They come up with complicated schemes of metadata, which never gets properly filled or parsed, thus resulting in conflicting information about license being used. And if you ask them to clarify they will just say, "yes yes it's open data you can reuse it", with the government employee having no understanding about differences between various licenses and that not all open data is equal.
geokon · · focus · HN ↗
- I sort of respect the copyleft ethos. You put out a thing with the understand everything it touches is also going to be openly available. I think attribution isn't really part of the central idea there.
- I also respect the MIT/BSD style thing where you're just putting stuff out there in the public domain and it's part of the corpus of human knowledge. You leave your mark so to speak.
The middle ground of "You can use this but you gotta promote our service and stamp our name on it" just feels icky. I don't want to contribute to that. I feel I'm helping OSM the organization and.. I don't know them .. are they good stewards of the data I'm giving them? Are they going to be good stewards in 10 years? Hopefully that kinda makes sense? I guess the same can be said for Wikipedia, but Wikipedia for better or worse is very siloed. You have to attribute stuff you copy from Wiki but ..
A: Realistically nobody is actually copying wiki articles other than lazy high school students. It's just not very reusable outside of Wikipedia
B: This is more of a plagiarism issue. It encourages people to disclose it's not their own words (this is not an issue with maps.. nobody thinks you surveyed your city to draw the map)
If Wiki became CC0 tomorrow nothing would really change. If you needed to fork Wiki and put an attribution in the footer, it'd be very innocuous..
Karliss · · focus · HN ↗
geokon · · focus · HN ↗
The OSM situation seems more akin to GIMP insisting you have to watermark every image with "Made thanks to the GIMP Corporation!"
cowsandmilk · · focus · HN ↗
That’s not true.
geokon · · focus · HN ↗
> Licences that are not compatible
> Licences that require downstream attribution
> For practical reasons we require that users of OpenStreetMap data attribute the project as a whole and we in turn provide attribution to third parties via the "Contributor" pages. Licences and terms of use that require attribution of the third party data source directly on derived works are incompatible.
"require attribution of the third party data source directly on derived works" is exactly what OSM requires. It's hypocrisy of a sorts
Doctor_Fegg · · focus · HN ↗
OSM's sharealike provision has never been about making the project "viral". Free map data is enough to do that by itself.
OSM's sharealike provision is, and always has been, unambiguously aimed at stopping bigcos killing the project by scooping up the map data then contributing nothing back - the scenario where Schmoogle Maps takes all OSM's footpath data, combines it with their own motor-centric, sensor-fuelled dataset to create the one map to rule them all, and thereby attracts the flow of new contributors that OSM needs to survive.
Ajedi32 · · focus · HN ↗
geokon · · focus · HN ↗
Can you imagine if GIMP has a similar policy to watermark all it's output with a "Made my GIMP!" in an effort to "attracts the flow of new contributors" and to make it hard for people to build a product with it?
JacketPotato · · focus · HN ↗
geokon · · focus · HN ↗
donalhunt · · focus · HN ↗