> 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)
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".
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.
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
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!"