ODbL in Thailand

Thanks for the explanations in the heading. Now it’s clear to me. I’m looking forward to updates and the future progress. Hopefully there will be one.

A week later 8 more agreed to the new Contributor terms. Unfortunately no one from the top 20 did.

http://downloads.osm-tools.org/check-odbl-th-20101219.html

As the OSMF now announced the latest date for phase 4 we know that these will not be able to edit any more after March 31st unless agreeing to the new contributor terms.
https://docs.google.com/View?id=d38xqz5_6fj2bcdcm

I hope these mappers decide to agree to the new CT so we still have their valuable contributions after the license change.

Not much change in the sense of ODbL. Thai data grows rapidly. This could be related to Bing imagery or to a different tool I used to extract the Thailand polygon.

http://downloads.osm-tools.org/check-odbl-th-20101228.html

Thanks for the statistics.

IMHO data grow in Thailand is mainly due to the availability of Bing Sat. In a minor mapped country like Thailand you can add a lot in short time based on Bing Sat even if it is available only in some parts with high resolution. The top group of people mapping in Thailand who agreed to the new license are now six and all six contributed a significant amount of nodes since your first Thailand statistic. In their changeset comments I see Bing mentioned several times.

Hi all,

It doesn’t say anywhere on that page that data from people who have declined or not agreed to the new licence will be deleted. In fact, it doesn’t say anything about what happens to such data.

Is this stated elsewhere? If so, I wonder why it is not on the licence page, as it seems important to know.

Has anybody tried to contact the top users who have not yet agreed?

Cheers,
Peter.

Hi Peter,

no data will ever be deleted. All existing data will be available as CC-BY-SA forever.

But what will happen is that it will not be included in future versions of OSM.

In case OSM would switch the license in lets say August, it would publish a full planet containing all data licensed under CC-BY-SA.

Then the project would continue using ODbL. As CC-BY-SA is not compatible with ODbL all data that is not dual-licensed can not be part of this NEW database. It won’t be there.
Based on this new ODbL licensed database will be the future planet extracts and map renderings. Also editing will take place on the new data.

So even with no data being deleted, it will not be included in future versions of ODbL.
From the point of a map-user it might feel the same as data being deleted.

I maintain an updated statistic of the current situation in Thailand here:
http://downloads.osm-tools.org/check-odbl-th/

e.g. from the top20 contributors (86% of all nodes) 14 have agreed to ODbL already. 51% of all users editing in Thailand already agreed to ODbL.

Contacting users NOW might be too early. OSMF will prevent users not agreeing to ODbL from editing latest March 31st. It will contact all users before that date.
In the wiki is a list of users already contacted.
Details about the license change are on this page and its sub-pages:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License

Stephan

Thanks for that exhaustive explanation.

However, by creating a new db which doesn’t contain this data it is effectively deleted, as far as users are concerned. I can see that this will make a big mess, with disconnected roads and what not.

I missed voting on all of this, but had I known about it I would have voted against it.

Cheers,
Peter.

I agreed today.
My apologies, I have been very busy lately and not so active on OSM.
Hopefully that will change in the near future, work gets in the way of so much :wink:

Cheers

Dui.

It is important that people don’t agree to odbl, and I won’t do.
So instead of annoying users better tell people to fight the stupid economic (and other) interests driving the odbl and make sure we keep a free mapping project in the spirit of the cc-by-sa license!!

amai

Unfortunately, I already did, because I didn’t want my edits to be removed and the info page in the wiki basically states that that will be what was going to happen if I didn’t agree. At the time I didn’t consider what that actually meant. It seems that some legal beagles in the OSMF have persuaded the rest of the members to corrupt the data, so they could change the licence.

I don’t really understand all the legal implications and there may well be good reasons to change the licence. I don’t have a problem with that. I only have a problem with corrupting the data and it seems this will now happen.

Now that I have clicked on ‘agree’ it seems that I can’t undo it.

Regards,
Peter.

It is not within the interest of the drivers of odbl to tell people those details. Their main reason for the change is an economic one… :frowning:
And since the guys in control of the OSM infrastructure joined, they could force the move.

The result of odbl on the non-economic side is a loss of data (in the new odbl map, to be precise) and an unknown amount (>0) of legal trouble.
https://groups.google.com/group/osm-fork and the wiki (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Open_Data_Licence) have more information.

amai

@amai: Please stop with conspiracy theory here. There is a legal mailing list for in-depth discussion of the new license. Right now there is no license change. By agreeing to the new contributor terms you give the OSMF the possibility to change the license. It’s not needed to be ODbL. Might also be a CC 4.0, but this would also the agreement to the new CT.

I don’t know whether you are a lawyer specialized in international copyright law. But based on the assumption of some lawyers our data is not protected. So some US company COULD just take the data, use it and ignore the share alike (because you can’t copyright on facts).

PD would make the data freely available (creative-commons suggested this), but with this we also loose the share-alike. And a lot of people have trouble with the imagination that some “evil” company could “abuse” the data entered by volunteers without giving back to the community.

In my opinion it’s the right way to have clear license situation also including the commercial use of our data. OSM is also about commercial use.
For non-commercial nearly no one would need OSM. In Thailand the data provided by Google still has greater coverage than OSM. And it’s allowed to be used even commercially while complying to Googles TOU. For private nc use there are even more alternatives.

So why doing OSM? Sure we want it to be the best and most comprehensive data provider in the world.
When companies get interested in our data it’s an appreciation of our work and quality.

Please read some infos from creativecommons, the guys who invented the current CC-BY-SA.
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/26283
They state that our data is not protected due to the problem that facts are not covered by copyright. They admit that they need to consider database law.

Stephan

@stephankn: Please stop odbl or new CT advocacy here!!

There is and has been no democratic decision of any board or even all members which was in favour of even asking people for a change. That is just a decision by a minority.

As for the license/ct itself:
There is no know lost case anywhere which would have disturbed anybody from within OSM. There is no proof of odbl to prevent that anyway.
And also it’s not theory… As for me I am 100% sure I don’t get income related to OSM, for the odbl drivers we know opposite.
And also it got confessed that their business would benefit, that is not a secret.

The given link shows up a comment from the author, and not in favour of odbl. In any case “that facts are not covered by copyright.” is a weak, and at best local argument (countrywide…) . When I create map data that is pretty much like doing an artwork, taking a picture. And in Germany (yes, I am German) that is clearly covered by copyright, even if it just shows “reality”. Even I if would take a picture from your face I would be the single copyright holder :slight_smile:

But back to the local focus: From a neutral point of view the benefit of any license switch is disputable, the problems are obvious and guaranteed.

amai

Please provide proof of why “those” would benefit for their business.

CreativeCommons suggested to use CC0 for scientific data. Wouldn’t that be the best option for their business? They could do whatever they want without any need to give back to the community.
But they decided against what’s best for a business and said they wanted a license that provides better guarantees of share-alike than the existing one.
Sounds not very logical, Not if you accuse them of trying to cheat the community.

In real life it most times the most likely thing that’s true. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

For German law I’m quite sure that mapping facts in a database is not covered by copyright law. There is a lack of threshold of originality.
In Europe our work is protected by database law. A thing that is missing for example in the US.
That idea was not brought up by the OSMF but from CreativeCommons (see link, that’s why they work on 4.0 regarding this) and the lawyers from ODbL. Both parties not related to those “evil” OSMF board members you talk about.

Why should it be a bad thing to make money with OSM data? Are you jealous because you don’t?
Think of Linux. Companies like Redhat or SuSE. They made millions out of the voluntary work of others. Think of apache. Millions of installations world-wide. What do they give back to the community?
The community happily contributed because the GPL gave them the certainty their work stayed free (freedom, not free beer).

I like the idea of my work being useful. Making the world a better one :slight_smile: If some company uses free data and the quality of the product is high enough that people pay for it, be happy that you have been part of the community creating the data. And because we have free data we can always take the data and make a similar product available free of charge.

On the legal mailing list had been a long discussion on how the share-alike of ODbL could be circumvented. They found that there is no practical way to do so. No danger from that side.

Cause their customers don’t want to share what they pay for… Or other way round: less customers want non-exclusive content…

Same for a simple picture of my or your face - shot within 2 seconds, but copyrighted.
… Note that a database which cannot be used to produce works out of it is quite useless…

And note that I don’t reproduce “facts”! A phone number (http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Why_CC_BY-SA_is_Unsuitable) is a fact in any representation, I create a small excerpt from reality filtered by various technical tools and hard work. So my mapping is quite different compared to the quoted phone/address book.

Even if I would be - it wouldn’t count as an argument!?
Funny, if ones doesn’t agree to odbl people show up with paranoia, from working for companies in the same business, being jealous, want to become lonely hero and other interesting things.

Ok, actually you are right that is not the perfect forum for that.
However it is important that people understand what is to come, and the odbl map for Thailand would miss many many ways.

amai

The phase 4 of the license change is in effect now for about a week. That means only users that have agreed to the contributor terms can continue editing. Mails went to all mappers that had not responded yet.

For Thailand most data is already relicense-ready as the majority of mappers agreed to the new contributor terms.

From the top 100 contributor (for the ease of counting, used last editor on nodes) the majority responded and agreed to the new contributor terms. These 100 mappers contributed about 99% of the data.
Only two actively voted against relicensing their data. Unfortunately amai still fears the license change. If he does not relicense then 4% of the nodes and 12% of the ways are lost.
2% of the nodes (0.7% of ways) are accounted to mappers that did not respond yet.

The statistic is available on my server:
http://downloads.osm-tools.org/check-odbl-th/check-odbl-th-20110625.html

Another interesting figure might be that the amount of data in Thailand doubled since the beginning of the year. Certainly a lot of this is based on armchair mapping. Hope people on the ground catch up and improve the geometry with data like street names and POIs. Please don’t forget to add the names also (mainly) in Thai script. You can contact me if you need assistance in doing so.

Keep on mapping,

Stephan

Hi stephankn,

thanks for keeping us up to date. A lot has changed till my last post. It’s amazing and i hope it will go on like this.

Would say that we still need some more Thai people joining us, but i am confident this will happen over the time. Still a lot of work to do in Thailand. But OK, we all like the country and like doing some useful work in our spare time. And it is too hot to hurry here :slight_smile:

Greetings,
WanTan

Another update.

The statistics now lists edits from anonymous users as declined.

The License Working Group suggests now to start replacing non-odbl data in case you have the same data. So delete the affected nodes/ways and replace them with your surveyed data.
In case you don’t have local knowledge please do not delete data as we want to keep a usable map.
LWG announcement: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2011-July/059458.html

ODbL statistics are here:
http://downloads.osm-tools.org/check-odbl-th/

The script now also generates a filter line to be used with osmfilter.
I prepared extracts that can be used as a separate layer in JOSM to find spots that need to be reworked. The JOSM licensechange plugin helps, Potlatch can also display the license status.
Decompress with 7zip then open in JOSM.

File listing last edits of anonymous users:
http://downloads.osm-tools.org/thailand-anon-20110723.7z

File listing last edits of all declining users:
http://downloads.osm-tools.org/thailand-declined-20110723.7z

Here you can see it on an overview image:
http://downloads.osm-tools.org/thailand-declined-20110723.jpg

The Bangkok area has a lot of streets that are drawn from aerial images. It’s easy to replace this. A residential area is very obvious on aerial images. Please pay attention as some images might have an offset. Always download the GPS tracks of the area you are editing and correlate the image with GPS tracks. Be especially careful in Bangkok as the GPS tracks can suffer from multipath effects.

I have included links to the Where Did You Edit (WDYE) service. You can see the region where the user is mapping.

http://downloads.osm-tools.org/check-odbl-th/check-odbl-th-20110802.html

Edit: corrected link

Until July I only replaced objects having a licence change issue when I touched them in the course of my mapping. But now there are the LWG statement about replacing non ODbL data and the JOSM Plugin LicenseChange. I started to search and replace such objects since begin of August. To be precise it’s not just a replacement, it’s an improvement: taking into account Bing offset and adding more objects with higher accuracy than the deleted objects. By the way it was raining cats and dogs here and I finished adding the collected data from my last trips and reached 500,000 nodes last modified.

The province Khon Kaen was my first target. The most data to be replaced were about 170 ways with 2800 nodes of one decliner traced from Bing. In the bounding box for the province there are now less than 20 nodes left which I can’t replace. Just deleting them could be regarded as vandalism even if it’s a small number. Some might still agree.

The JOSM plug-in from Frederick helps a lot. It’s fast and checks the whole history not only the last change. With this I found that I had added “long ago” the Thai name to some of the hospitals added by someone not agreeing yet.

Now I’m going to replace issues in the whole Northeast. Again from the major decliner about 1000 ways with about 12,000 nodes traced from Bing. A lot but easy to do.

I can’t resist to add that with JOSM and the plug-in it’s a “pleasure to hunt down” the licence change issues. I think it’s better than waiting until a worldwide tool will delete the data. A mapper with local knowledge is better in assessing the issues case by case. And it’s easier to replace existing data than to “re-add” them. The transition will be smoother. But the major advantage for me as mapper is that I don’t have to care about licence change issues any more when editing in a cleaned area.

Happy mapping from a happy mapper
Willi

Edit: corrected link to plugin