In 20 years I’ve never been censored on an forum/BBS. I’m Shocked, and pretty hurt.
Well, what can I say, I’m sorry. What should I’ve done else? What should you’ve done else? Can you advise please?
The posts pushing PON should be removed because they are clearly advertisements for an commercial product.
I don’t know what Gary did, I emailed him. Lets see what happens, I really don’t think you should bother with this anymore, this is something between Gary and me.
Emj, this has gone a bit too far to delete everything and pretend nothing happened. I don’t know about you but I’m not threatened by law suits every day. Besides that, PONC and postcodes have a relevance to OSM and the subject would turn up another day anyway.
Having seen this discussion, knowing the reactions of OSMers on commercial licenses and the actions performed by certain people when they receive negative reactions, I don’t think PONC has a bright future with OSM.
Also, I don’t think we should spend more time with arguing about what’s been said and done. I know now that there is little chance of agreement.
Guys, I think we needn’t worry too much about the closed nature of the pon codes system. Notwithstanding the domain name “irishpostcodes.ie”, pon codes are nothing of the sort. The Republic of Ireland currently has no postal code system. A continually postponed project is in progress to choose and implement a scheme of postcodes and, unless Gary cares to correct me, no choice has been made as to how they should work.
That being so, it is at best premature and at worst, sneaky, to promote pon codes under such a domain name. Given that there are an infinite number of ways we could choose codes for locations, any scheme will only be adopted if it either:
a) is official and ubiquitous
b) exhibits sufficient other qualities to encourage an ambivalent public of its merits
Neither is true of pon codes. So far, the poll on http://irishpostcodes.ie/ indicates that 201 people on an island of 5 million might be open to option (b). Perhaps a larger sample will show us the facts on this.
BTW, I’ve worked out a way to compress Irish National Grid references using gzip and some proprietary foo - I’ll be happy to negotiate a licence with anybody keen on my innovation and I’ll allow OSM to have one for free as long as they don’t pass on the usage rights to anybody else.
From an OSM point of view postcodes generated by an algorithm would be great. It’s a massive amount less effort to reverse engineer a lat,lon ↔ postcode algorithm than to manually locate the lat,lon of every postcode.
I wouldn’t be surprised if after the ROI have decided upon and implemented such a system free the post code are still collecting UK postcodes.
There was mentioning of geohash earlier in this thread which can do the same. It needs a few characters more, but if you somehow manage to remove all the oceans from the equation then you’d probably also have something like PONC but without the license debate.
delete