Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is on point. We once had an issue with open street maps, that caused our routing system to not be capable of directing citizens and employees to the second biggest municipality in our country because a one way street had the wrong direction marked in OSM by mistake.

This had a huge impact on us. With thousands of employees and citizens calling our IT support staff of 5 people every day.

When I used our OSM official “City off X” account to fix it, I was an utter idiot and submitted both a real life picture I took myself as well as a Google maps and a krak maps (Danish map service) screenshots. I didn’t know this wasn’t legal, because I was an idiot, but it resulted in our fix getting reversed and a week long discussion with the OSM community members about fixing the damn street.

We made the street one way. But we couldn’t fix it in an OSS map service because the community wouldn’t let us because we made a stupid mistake.

We’ve now switched our services to Krak. But I can promise you that if we had, had the admin power to force our chance through during those days, we wouldn’t have given any regards to the OSS community.

If an popular tool wasn’t working within the .Net framework CLA I imagine the process would be somewhat similar inside Microsoft.

It’s just one of those things where the OSS community processes and Enterprise process of “get this fixed right now, at any cost by any means, ignoring every standard we may have, just get it fixed, now. Then make sure it never happens again.” that happens every now and then when the beast awakens, clashes. I’m not sure how you can avoid it, as Enterprise will never want to comply with OSS processes when it’s in a hurry.

Regarding the OSM part, how was that illegal? You had 3 different sources for your information. The pictures you took were only your own and you were free to use them for whatever you wanted. Using a copyrighted map to validate that the images were correct is entirely within the use allowed by those maps. The edit was based on the pictures and your real life observation, not those other maps, so you own the edit, which your are well within your right to contribute to OSM.

I get that the OSM community is trying to practice something equivalent to a clean room reimplementation, but that's equivalent to a person in the "cleanroom" being shown a public domain code library and then a file from that same library, but taken out of a ROM dump. Yes, they saw the copyrighted file, but they also saw the public domain file so they're entirely within their right to base their reimplementation either partially or fully on it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28797040

There was no copying. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not sure this observation is to the point. Most enterprises do not allow this kind of behavior either, unless you happen to sit at the right place in the hierarchy. If you had violated the terms of service of Google Maps, they would probably have banned you immediately too.

But yes, it may seem a little confusing that even though you can do X, it may not be appropriate.

I think that's also why people are upset in this case. They actually did try to protect themselves from power grabs, only to find themselves cheated.

By the way, there's a Danish mailing list for OSM. I don't know if you explained the issue there, but if you did, I think it's likely someone would have made the correction for you relatively quickly.

> I didn’t know this wasn’t legal, [...]

What was the problem? Why isn't that legal?

The screenshots are evidence of copyright infringement of commercial maps.

... how?

At best it's a breach of GMaps ToS by that user. And in this case the user attached a photo they took. The screenshots are just noise.

I think the google maps screenshot is poison?

But there was also the photo made by the user. I'm trying to understand the legal aspect of this. If Google felt they suffered so much of this, they should bring a (civil) lawsuit against the user that uploaded that photo. Why would OSM care in this situation?

Because OSM wants to be really really sure their data is not tainted and gets them or their users into trouble. As such, anything that suggests that you are using improper sources for editing and is noticed will get you looked at, maybe get someone to double-check your past edits, ...

And since its a community consensus thing, people will wait a few days to reintroduce a change once it has been challenged unless the challenge is obviously unreasonable. It's not like a change being delayed a few days is some unreasonable big punishment, it's just part of QA process to run. Maybe wasn't strictly necessary here, but it's a really obvious warning signal to trip.

(To make a (admittedly stretched) software analogy, if you submit a PR somewhere and show disassembly from the Windows kernel as evidence that it's a good algorithm others also use, it'll also cause some concern, and you would've been better of just showing your solution on its own)

I don't understand. Cannot you create a PR and fork the project (and use your fork in the meantime until the PR is merged)? This is what I do when I use opensource libraries. They being opensource shouldn't mean that you get blocked by them.

OSM is one big online database, like wikipedia. Sure you can fork it, but it's far from trivial to "maintain" that :)

Sorry, but what specifically was illegal? And as in laws, or OSM project governance?

You can't use copyrighted maps as a data source for OSM:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/welcome

"Unless you have special permission, don't copy from online or paper maps."

Thanks.

Legal was probably the wrong word to use. It’s against the policy of OSM. It’s probably not actually illegal as far as the law goes.

I mean, we own the map rights. Google had to seek permission from us to map our area and publish it.

Nice story, dude. :)

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