2011/1/6 Ralf Kleineisel <r...@kleineisel.de> > Remember, the goal of OSM is a FREE map, not one with a lot of rules and > restrictions. There are enough restricted maps out there. >
Let me express another comment on this. OSM's map is FREE in the sense that it is FREELY USABLE and DISTRIBUTABLE. You can do what you want with it, you can base your work on it, you can sell your work, etcetera. BUT, if you want to MAKE that map, you have to go some length to DEFINE *HOW* you do it. Let's not fall in the wrong conviction that Open Source and FOSS equal anarchy. If Stallman had let any contributor do what they wanted, there would probably be no emacs today; on the contrary, while anyone is free to contribute whatever he wants, he has to do it in a way that fulfills the guidelines of the project. It's something that ANY project must do not to fail. I think nobody is trying to prevent people from mapping whatever strange and esotic feature into OSM. We're only trying to see whether it's possible to say, ok, you want to map it, great!, let's decide a way that *everyone* should map it. Of course it's often hard to decide: for example, in the last few weeks on talk-it we exhumed once again the problem that an amenity=bar is not really a "bar" as we conceive it in Italy. Sadly though, despite the interesting debate, and notwithstanding the fact that both parties are "quite right", this means that in fact bars aren't mapped reliably at least in Italy, so if I was to make a map of places where you eat in Milan I'd have to check with local mappers what they agreed upon - even worse, what mapper X decided to map as amenity=bar and what mapper Y decided to map as amenity=cafe. *For all the good reasons*, mind it; but in fact the map is not reliably usable. Ciao, Simone
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