Hello everyone,
as many of you will already know, OpenStreetMap has been planning to
change its license from CC-BY-SA 2.0 to OdBL 1.0 for a long time now
(several years). It appears that the date of the actual change is now
approaching fast and that the intended plan[3] suggests that the change
will begin on the 27th of March and be complete by the 1st of April.
As, unlike Wikipedia, with its change to CC-BY-SA, OSM so far has not
had a clause in the license to switch to a different license, it had to
independently and separately ask all of its contributors to relicense
their data to the new license.
In a project with more than 200.000 contributors reaching all of them
and getting them to agree to a new license is an (near) impossible task.
Therefore despite OSM(F)'s best effort to reach as many mappers as
possible, obviously not all could be reached and convinced to agree.
As OSMF does not hold the copyright (the individual mappers do), it can
only re-license the content for which it has permission and has to
delete all other data.
Worldwide currently 2% - 3% of data are affected[1], but for some
regions or countries 10% or more of data have to be deleted.
The question for Wikipedia (in the sense of the maps rendered on the
toolserver and embedded in a number of language wikipedia's) now is how
to handle the license transition?
My suggestion is to freeze the toolserver's openstreetmap database on
the 27th and stop all data updates for now. After the dust settles on
the license change and the impact of the deleted data become more
apparent, one can reevaluate the situation and decide at what point the
missing updates are worth more than the deleted data. At that point a
fresh import of the OSM database would be necessary after which the
updates can resume. My guess would be that it would take a few weeks or
perhaps month for the most visible damage to the data to be fixed, but
it is very hard to predict this so far. An overview of the current
situation can be seen on cleanmap [2], which shows either what the map
will look like after the license change, or on badmap which data needs
to be removed or modified before the license change.
After the re-import, it will also require a slight adaptation of the
attribution to reflect the license change to OdBL. The tiles (which are
embedded in Wikipedia) I believe can still be published under CC-BY-SA
(it is only the data that is under OdBL, not the produced work) and I
don't think it will directly impact (or prevent) any of the current
other usage of OpenStreetMap data in Wikipedia. However, I don't know if
the Wikimedia legal council has or wants to say anything about it and /
or give its OK for continued inclusion?
What do others think? How should the OSM license change and the
resulting removal of data from its database be handled in Wikipedia? Do
people agree with the above suggestion? Does it have any other
consequences? Further thoughts?
Kai
[1] http://odbl.poole.ch/
[2] http://cleanmap.poole.ch/
[3] http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Rebuild_Plan
[4] http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/About_The_License_Change
I have recently spent quite a large amount of work on the
WikiMiniAtlas map plugin and this has some connection to the OSM
project, so I thought it might be of interest to the list.
* I finished rendering a more detailed basemap, based on OpenStreetMap
data last week. Accurate roads are now displayed at the higher
zoomlevels (starting with highways, then secondary level roads, all
the way down to residential streets and footpaths).
* The WikiMiniAtlas now has a little globe in the bottom right corner
that is always rotated to the current location you are looking at. KML
and WIWOSM overlays are also displayed on the globe. Note that this
feature needs a WebGL-capable browser (degrades gracefully).
* WMA is now resizable
* The WikiMiniAtlas is now active on Moon, Mars, Venus and Mercury
coordinates as well, displaying the labels of the selected globe only
(for example en.wp has >1100 moon coordinates, german wp has over
9000!). I have upgraded my database and scripts so that addition of
further globe types will be easy.
* As mentioned before, KML and WISOSM overlays are displayed and used
for centering and zooming. I went through great trouble to calculate a
_correct_ minimal bounding rectangle.
* WIWOSM data can be used to overlay arbitrary objects for size
comparison (the geometry is reprojected, so you can see for example
how Greenland really compares to the Democratic republic of the Congo
sizewise). (this will soon work for the new planets and the moon as
well, I have to add a correction for the planets radius, but then you
can see how many Rhode Islands would fit into the Gauss crater on the
moon)
Best,
Dschwen
Hello,
has somebody here experiences with mbtiles?
I want to render WIWOSM for to things:
*boring IE support
*to support Wikipedia categories and collection articles in the kind of
Template:GeoGroup/Vorlage:All Coordinates [1] A technical solution seems
me better before the people begin to tag this in OSM. A vector solution
for an article like "List of rivers of Germany" will kill each browser.
If I understand it correct in the actual mapbox-presentation[2] it's
possible to save render time and server space by using redundancy.
Greetings Kolossos
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:GeoGroup
[2] http://mapbox.com/blog/rendering-the-world/
Hello,
I integrated public transport map inside OSM-gadget in Wikipedia.
I decided to use "ÖPNV-Karte" because it looks in my eyes better than
the public transport map you can found at osm.org.
After talk with the developer of the map the additionally traffic should
be no problem.
Greetings Kolossos