Earlier this week Alex (from Mapbox) posted an diary entry on OpenStreetMap with his reasons as to why he feels that OpenStreetMap should drop the “Share Alike” component of its licence. As you would imagine, this created quite a bit of discussion both in the comments of the diary entry, but also on the “talk” mailing list. With the memory of the last licence change still fresh in my mind, I’ve refrained from adding any comment to these discussions, but I did pick up on one of the replies:
Alex states that “The reality is that OpenStreetMap is only used extensively in situations where the share-alike license does not apply, for instance, map rendering.” I’d respond by saying that’s because OSM doesn’t contain a lot of address or navigation data, not because of the license.
The reply above is taken from a longer response by Steve Coast. You can view the full reply here.
Here in the West Midlands we’ve done a lot of work to map addresses and other navigation data (see for example our gritting map), so today we’re simply asking Licence or Addresses? Submit your answer in the poll below.
(Poll is now closed)
Note: This is intended as a bit of fun. The results of the poll represent only an incredibly small part of the OpenStreetMap community and will therefore have no statistical significance. If you don’t like our poll, then don’t submit an answer.
Leave a Reply