OpenStreetMap Forum

Negreheb

Member

From: Austria

Registered: 2015-11-10

Posts: 612

OSM Buildings vs Cesium OSM Buildings

What happened here? I can read nothing anywhere on the Forum about that issue and now OSM Buildings seems now to be abandoned. https://github.com/OSMBuildings/OSMBuildings

A Link to a post https://medium.com/@osmbuildings/why-we … e6116a954d

Is there more information about that issue? Was the community consulted solely on mailing-lists? If yes, on which mailinglist? Its sad that an established project seemingly gets torpedoed by the OSMF.

Would like to get more information on that issue

Greetings

Tordanik

Moderator

From: Germany

Registered: 2008-06-17

Posts: 2,805

Website

Re: OSM Buildings vs Cesium OSM Buildings

What happened is that Cesium launched a product called "Cesium OSM Buildings". The original OSM Buildings is understandably unhappy about that because they have been using the name for years and this move by Cesium, a much larger player, is now causing confusion and harming their visibility.

The OSMF was only involved because Cesium has asked us whether it was ok to use "OSM" like that. But the OSMF only checks whether a name violates OSM's trademarks. We don't check whether a name violates someone else's trademarks. (Maybe we should? But it would certainly be a policy change for the OSMF to start arbitrating disputes between companies using OSM data.)

There was some discussion on the osmf-talk mailing list as well:
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/piperma … 06864.html

(Note that I didn't participate in this decision of the OSMF board of directors, even though I was already on the board at the time. I have an obvious conflict of interest, as both Cesium and OSM Buildings are technically competitors of my own OSM2World project.)

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OSM in 3D: OSM2World

Negreheb

Member

From: Austria

Registered: 2015-11-10

Posts: 612

Re: OSM Buildings vs Cesium OSM Buildings

Thanks for your explanation

But the OSMF only checks whether a name violates OSM's trademarks.

I see, that explains a lot. So it is basically a community "problem" and a thing between these two.

The article paints a bit the picture, in my opinion, like its a bit the fault of the OSMF.