OK. What I should have said was “The fact that it is not possible to easily retrieve a complete list of contributors”.
By way of example, I have the URL “http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.38767&lon=-1.65321&zoom=16&layers=0B0FTFT” which I’d like to save as a pretty JPEG.
Even that’s not easy - as soon as I click on ‘export’, my screen geometry changes and I have to dicker about until I can get everything in before I manually crop the image to get back to where I was. Anyway, after all that I have a picture. Now to get the contributors.
Hmmmm. How do I end up with an .osm file? Ah, export as XML doesn’t do what I assumed (create a .xml file), it creates a .osm. Next problem - Now I’ve got to work out what URL to call to get that file down onto the Linux box (no GUI!)…
Hmmm. Here’s where the fun starts. So, I need a way of going from the page URL (for example, “http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.38767&lon=-1.65321&zoom=16&layers=0B0FTF”) to the URL called when the form is submitted (taking into account the change of screen geometry).
OK. I give up, I don’t think I can do that in five minutes. So, I now have the .osm file on the Windows box and I’ll SFTP it to the Linux box for processing…
And so… The end result is:
“Richard”:6
“blackadder”:87
“southglos”:4
“morwen”:1
"Thomas:1
“Damocov”:130
“ulfl”:1
"Nick:566
Which is wrong. “Thomas” should be “Thomas Matern” and “Nick” should be “Nick Barnes”. OK, OK, I know I’m being picky and if I knew Perl I’d hack the code to allow for spaces. However, whether it says ‘Nick’ or ‘Nick Barnes’, that information still isn’t useful in any way, shape or form. Consider a third party looking at the list of names. “Hmmmm.”, they think, “I wonder who ‘blackadder’ is and which part they did”. They still have to come back to the site to find out. This has achieved absolutely nothing more than simply attributing the map to the site would have done in the first place.
Anyway, I ramble. My point is, it is not realistic to expect anybody who wants to use images to be able to do this and I’m also not sure that the usernames are adequate attribution even if it were.
The example above is for a small village and yet has 8 contributors. What about a map of, say, London? Am I expected to list the several hundred contributors? If anybody says ‘yes’ at this point, we may as well all pack up and go home as no bu88er will ever use OSM maps.
Let’s say I want a map of Birmingham on a T-Shirt I’m going to sell. Do you really want me to list all the contributors? Even looking at the ‘press’ section of the wiki and reading the legal licence stuff, it’s not clear that newspapers, magazines et al have to print a complete list. I can’t imagine a journalist would be willing to spend the time collating such a list either.
Attribution by anything other than a single blanket “by OSM contributors” is simply ridiculous. To expect otherwise is ludicrous in the extreme and I suspect that if a licence contravention case ever came to court, OSM would be laughed out of the building. Enforcing the licence in those terms would have the effect of scuttling the ship we’re all sailing in.
Nick.