While I think it's quite messed up that a company as rich as Apple can't abide putting credits for people who have put some really good work in (I've even made small updates to OSM in my time) I do think that this is a very classy move by the OSM people, no ranting blog post or 'Apple stole our stuff', welcoming people presents a much better image of the project.
If you look in the settings of applications like Pages you'll see a section named Contributions, they list opensource projects they use even for those whose license does not require to be mentioned.
While I'm agree with you that credits must be given where it is due, stretching it to the fact that this behavior would be in their DNA seems not backed up by facts in my point of view.
Really? The same Jobs who asked Stallman personally about whether or not Next's modifications to Objective C would need to be contributed back, and who then made sure they were contributed?
If Steve Jobs were still alive, he'd probably be pledging to deplete every last dollar of Apple's billions to run this stolen product into the ground. Who does OpenStreetMap think they are, anyway?
After making this comment I've come back to my 'comments' page from time to time and watched its karma value gyrate between positive and negative.
Do the down-mods represent people operating in good faith thinking I'm being mean-spirited, rude, and damaging the conversation? Or are they Apple fanboys upset by a little uncomfortable teasing at their expense? I can only speculate. :P
Personally, I just don't know what to make of your original comment, serious, or sarcastic, the clarity of what you are trying to get across just seems quite low.
Apples and Oranges. There are many web browsers. If you want a wiki map data, there is only OSM. Unless you have lots of money to licence other data, and can put up with their flaws (not as up to date as OSM, less detailed in some way etc.), OSM is the only horse in town.
This is great for OSM because it's starting to show how it's a real player, not just as as "open source map data", but "map data", i.e. it's competiting with the big, non-open source, map data providers now.
I think ElliotH knows that. His point is that OSM is probably going to be more effective publicly welcoming and reminding than throwing a hissyfit, even though they'd be justified in doing so.
It was for stealth. This does not absolve them of their legal and ethical responsibility to give credit where it's due, but it explains their actions above "they're dicks".
April 2010 is around when they would have started working on the maps back-end. Attribution would have meant dev releases would have indicated Apple using non-Google Maps data. They probably wanted to avoid that.
I noted in my original answer that "this does not absolve them of...responsibility".
Some of the comments were implying that Apple didn't give credit because they have a culture that is insolent. I was just trying to give context to the decision.
Sorry, reading and comprehension never was my strong suit. I just can't help but feel that by 'explaining' this behavior it is in some way condoning it. I see now that was not your intent.
It appears they've had these maps in their desktop products since about April 2010, so this explanation doesn't make any sense. (And if it did, then a simple switch to turn on attribution at launch time would have worked too).
Why is that, that if Apple ignores credit/copyright (on a massive scale), that everybody loves their move.
But if anybody would rip of an Apple product, the descendants of mighty Steve would come raining down with swords, axes and lawyers.
Do you really think they did it, to support OSM. Or should I ask myself: "Where is the money?"
The money, they do not have to pay Google anymore for the use of maps, while not crediting all these people, who supported OSM with their time and data-collecting.
The whole article is sarcasm laid on with a trowel by people who would probably be willing to chase all the media exposure and legal avenues available to them if Apple doesn't play nice from here on in.
I would love to be a fly-on-the wall at the Apple meeting where they are forced to discuss this.
It doesn't matter that Apple are a big company: they're still subject to the same rules as anyone else. This is by far the best way to have this issue resolved. Talking to people usually works a lot better than spamming them with legal documents.
> Do you really think they did it, to support OSM. Or should I ask myself: "Where is the money?"
To this very particular point I want to say, I think that large companies switching over to open technologies (edit: because of a profit motive) is a good thing. There needs to be a critical mass of people who value the openness per se in order for the sea change to happen, but ultimately it has to be because we make it more profitable to do so. I have zero expectations that a bunch of CEOs are going to start caring about any cause. If they switch over, it means we're succeeding in making it profitable, and I take that as a good sign.
Well I was just wondering, how many voices are raised in defending a coop, that is known for its love of details, but forgets to mention these tiny little humans, that gathered the data in the first place. </sarcasm>
It seems to me, that the Apple-Folks in Cupertino knew exactly, what they were doing. Who would sue Apple in a case like this anyway?
Being from Germany, I have no idea, what the US-System would look like, but I believe, that suing Apple would mean, that every one of the contributors to OSM would have to sue on his/her own.
And who would do that?
Apple would calculate this. And even, if some people would walk this way, it might still be cheaper, than paying Google.
It seems to be driven by the sort of cost benefit analysis that one uses in logistics and elsewhere in business.
With an army of IP lawyers at their disposal, a multi-billion dollar war chest, and an opponent running on a shoe-string, they can probably force OSM to go all-in if it comes to a lawsuit.
The cynical part of me sees this as great publicity for iPhoto using the P.T. Barnum principle:
"I don't care what they say about me, just make sure they spell my name right! "
It is also unrealistic to assume the worst. It is more likely that attribution slipped though the cracks then it is that the Apple executives made a conscious decision to not include attribution in violation of the license.
It can also make it expedient and more effective to operate in the real world. You can always say "we tried to approach them and work with them nicely" when you start making noise and going nuclear after they don't respond.
Exactly, it's a very pragmatic move. After all, who has more lawyers? I think that people need to ask the question, "What do I hope to get out of this particular thing I'm about to do or say?" more often, as opposed to, "What am I justified in doing or saying?"
Well, the license (CC-By-SA) requires that "The credit required by this Section 4(c) may be implemented in any reasonable manner;". So it doesn't need to be in the footer of the map, when there is no footer at all ("at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors"), but I think the EULA/about not reasonable.
But other people might disagree. There are even people that think the whole license is invalid and that it can be used as Public Domain, because the license is for creative work and not meant to be used for databases. This is the major reason OSM is changing to a different license right now (ODbL).
Did you look where (s)he indicated or at the right place? Settings-General-About lists (zillions) of licenses for projects used in iOS itself. If I understand this correctly, this is about the new iPhoto app. The Numbers and Pages apps have an 'Acknowledgements' page in the Settings app. Is that where you looked?
"...the selection or arrangement of data only results in a protected compilation if the end result qualifies as an original intellectual creation."
(This actually saved me in university when the school wanted to charge me with copyright violation after I scraped their job database to make it easier to work with.)
Well, the university uses a crappy PeopleSoft webapp thing for searching for co-op jobs. It's slow, ugly, and it goes offline every night at midnight. It's terrible.
I got fed up with trying to use it, so I looked at the HTML and decided that it was easy enough to parse. I made the deliberate decision to link to the original job descriptions so that you'd still have to log in to find any real information about the jobs. However, a listing of {employer,job title,location} seemed harmless enough.
I wrote it such that it ran once and spat out a static HTML file so that it wouldn't be constantly accessing the original server. Then I hosted it on my university account and told people about it via Twitter. I had no intention of hiding it; I wanted it to help people! Also, I posted the scraping script (which required a university account to login before it could run) on GitHub for others to use or improve. Y'know.
A few days later, my account had been disabled! When I went to see the people in charge, they told me that I was violating their copyright and since I has posted my code to scrape, they considered me to be a malicious hacker. They also said that I could have single-handedly taken down the co-op program at the university.
For my formal response, I learned some obscure details about Canadian copyright law (like what I posted in the grandparent), and took the opportunity to educate the administrators on hacker culture (with the help of Eric Raymond). I also made sure to explain the implications of my script (runs only once, requires a login, links to the actual copyrighted works). Oh, and I used some of my connections with IT security and professors as character reference.
In the end, they decided to punish me for reproducing their data (which the login screen technically prohibits, but it's unrealistic- having the page in memory is a reproduction!) by making me take a business ethics course, which was actually a fun and interesting course. No criminal charges, no expulsion/suspension. I figured it wasn't too bad, though I would have appreciated an apology for essentially calling me a terrorist. ;)
What would have happened if you declined to take the course? Do you think you "learned your lesson", or would you do something like this again if you had the chance?
They added the course as one of my graduation requirements, so I guess I wouldn't have graduated.
The lesson I learned is to not try to make others' lives easier. :P I definitely won't shy away from scraping whatever data sources I can get my hands on, but I probably won't share the results with large groups of people.
I wonder if that means Apple could take the individual facts from OSM, add a few in from their other sources, reorder the facts (or just build their own tiles from them since that's all they're presenting) and be okay legally?
Map qualifies as "set of facts" just as much as a photograph of something is representation of a fact. So no, maps are not facts. It is quite subjective model of the world. I would say that OSM is huge collaborative piece of art, and I'm proud to be one of the artists there.
