I wrote about this in the context of OpenStreetMap a couple of years ago (https://blog.systemed.net/post/18), but with rather different reasoning:
> We didn’t realise it at the time, but OpenStreetMap came from a unique moment in internet history.
> It was still the time of the Old Internet. The time when you, or anyone, could upload a few pages to your own “webspace” or “homepage”, writing about what took your fancy. You didn’t have to worry about Facebook and Google as gatekeepers, or HTTPS, or your server being compromised within five minutes of turning on, or GDPR, or front-end frameworks, or any of the curses of the modern web.
> 2004 was when the homegrown web met the participatory web, before it all got turned to shit by Facebook and Google. You wouldn’t start OSM in 2024: the nascent project would be squashed by Google, or founder under Reddit/HN users’ expectations of “why not good yet”, or flame out in some controversy over privacy or disputed borders. But we got through all of that in our early years, when the world was simpler.
You're more or less right. OSM (via an exhaustive licence change process) did indeed choose the licence that matched its preferences, and almost all contributors are happy that it allows commercial use.
What does stick in the craw with many of us, however, is that Meta, Mapbox, and various other bigcos have nonetheless decided to disregard the attribution requirements of what is a fairly permissive licence, simply because they're sufficiently big that they can say to the OSM Foundation (annual turnover about £3.27) "suck it, we dare you to sue us".
OSM has _just_ managed the balancing act of getting corporate funding without becoming beholden to the funders or adopting a corporate ethos. (The corporates have gone off and founded their own project, Overture, and everyone is the better for them doing so.) But it has required a lot of pushback over the years against people trying to “professionalise” us, and I can’t say we’ve won every battle.
> I really thought TextEdit would have a setting for hiding the toolbar, but I haven’t found one.
It used to. It became always-on in one of the big cat releases, I forget which one. I too wish it had this option, but given that it's about the only thing I'd change in TextEdit, I can live with it.
Deferring to Government naming is only one possible approach. OpenStreetMap takes another: “the name that people use on the ground”. The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico in OSM and will remain so until popular parlance changes.
No, as someone who writes a cycle routing engine by hand, this stuff is endemic when dealing with the trifecta of complex traffic regulations, inconsistent mapping data, and user preferences.
Looking at the repository [1], there are very strong signs for this being LLM generated. The README.md just smells of LLM tells, and Claude Code is being listed as "contributor".
I agree that the tone the parent commenter used wasn't the nicest but unfortunately, factually he is correct.
This. curl | bash has never nuked my local Postgres db, unlike one of the recommended package managers. Nor stopped my wife’s computer from booting, unlike a certain well known browser installer from one of the world’s biggest companies.
> It's a great project.. but I think they really messed up the licensing in a misguided effort to make the project viral.
OSM's sharealike provision has never been about making the project "viral". Free map data is enough to do that by itself.
OSM's sharealike provision is, and always has been, unambiguously aimed at stopping bigcos killing the project by scooping up the map data then contributing nothing back - the scenario where Schmoogle Maps takes all OSM's footpath data, combines it with their own motor-centric, sensor-fuelled dataset to create the one map to rule them all, and thereby attracts the flow of new contributors that OSM needs to survive.
The subtext seems to be a hostility towards people making money from what you've shared.. which I find sort of baffling - but is very on-brand for the general anti-capitalist sentiments in the memesphere. People building on your work feels like something to be celebrated, but I guess it's a difference of opinion. I'm just generally skeptical that this would be "killing the project" at all.. it feels like it'd be the other way around? If OSM data were for instance used by Google and Apple Maps.. it feels like it'd just have made it more foundational and would get people even more excited to contribute. It'd be the world's central repository of map data everyone builds off of.. like the Debian of maps. Instead it's a parochial project for map nerds.
Can you imagine if GIMP has a similar policy to watermark all it's output with a "Made my GIMP!" in an effort to "attracts the flow of new contributors" and to make it hard for people to build a product with it?
Oh interesting! So they manage to not watermark their maps. OSM seems to heavily imply you should watermark, but as I understand it, it's not strictly required
> We didn’t realise it at the time, but OpenStreetMap came from a unique moment in internet history.
> It was still the time of the Old Internet. The time when you, or anyone, could upload a few pages to your own “webspace” or “homepage”, writing about what took your fancy. You didn’t have to worry about Facebook and Google as gatekeepers, or HTTPS, or your server being compromised within five minutes of turning on, or GDPR, or front-end frameworks, or any of the curses of the modern web.
> 2004 was when the homegrown web met the participatory web, before it all got turned to shit by Facebook and Google. You wouldn’t start OSM in 2024: the nascent project would be squashed by Google, or founder under Reddit/HN users’ expectations of “why not good yet”, or flame out in some controversy over privacy or disputed borders. But we got through all of that in our early years, when the world was simpler.
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