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by 1ris 4482 days ago
Oh, the good old BSD vs GPL religious debate.

I just want to add: If i wanted my map data available "to the industry" (that BSD supporters claim can't use the GPL model) I would have used google map maker and not OSM. And i did not make this decision by accident, but because i believe in free software and free data. Please respect that. I think with dropping the copyleft osm makes itself superfluous and it will get replaced by the commercial products it once wanted to replace. There won't be a reason to choose osm over google anymore.

1 comments

It would still be very different. If you contribute to google mapmaker, only google could use it. If you contribute to a non-share-alike OSM, anyone can use it...
> If you contribute to a non-share-alike OSM, anyone can use it..

I want those who agree with the project's principals to use the dataset, not just anyone. OSM isn't just a collection of data, its open collaboration. Removing share-alike breaks the model of that collaboration.

The main assumption in the article was that people who voluntarily create maps (like I did) only care how much people they reach with the product of their work. And if that would be the case I would have chosen google map maker because absolutely everybody uses google maps. Google maps does not have a free data api, but that is completely irrelevant for this argument since nobody 1) uses that anyway.

1) Only a negligible fraction of people using maps.