This is the third time you've written a diary entry threatening to leave. It's less and less convincing every time you say it.

If you feel that strongly, then you are better off without OSM, and OSM is better off without you. You may find a fork like FOSM more suited to your view. Enjoy whatever you do next, and bye.

@Chaso99: I have declared that, by placing the PD userbox on osm.wiki/User:Richard . That's the entire point of that box. I don't go round tagging every single object I upload to OSM with "licence: PD" or commenting every single line of code in P2 with "// this line is licensed public domain", either!

Ko1umbus: the biggest issue is lack of volunteers to do anything other than mapping. If we had more people working on development, the site would get easier to use. If we had more people working on publicity... we'd have more publicity. Do join in. :)

Don't forget that plenty of people declare all their contributions, to the wiki and elsewhere, to be public domain.

Yes, you do.

OffMaps is very highly regarded for iOS.

Interesting thought.

I don't think the distance thing would work. It's possible to know lots about an area where you don't live. For example, I pretty much live in two places at the moment, but my home location can only be one of them. Similarly, I've been doing a bunch of mapping work in a place I often go on holiday.

But we do need to think of some way of restraining the global-change monkeys (to which Dasher's post, next to yours, also refers).

Nice work on the mapping!

I think it's a mistake to think of OSM's default rendering as anything other than a nice demo. Lots of other sites do already render just the bits they want (OpenCycleMap, for example). We want to encourage more of these - the whole vibrant ecosystem thing - rather than just expecting people to use https://www.openstreetmap.org's tiles for everything.

highway=tertiary, surface=unpaved | gravel | dirt | what-have-you.

If you want to provide unlimited downloading for mobile apps, go for it. Find some sponsorship from somewhere, get some servers, and start running a tile service. Call it osmtileserver.org. I'm sure it'd be hugely popular.

The current (unpaid, volunteer) sysadmins, however, are kept fully stretched by maintaining OSM for editors like you or I, and don't have the resources to run free servers for the benefit of people charging £4 per app in the Android app store. Nor do the places from whom we rent the bandwidth permit it.

"unless German copyright law is different from most other people's"

It isn't. Well, not like that. sdoerr is right - don't copy from other maps, and please remove any changes you have already made that were based on other maps.

Fortunately OpenStreetMap is an international project, controlled by a foundation registered in the UK, and so we don't have to take the blindest bit of notice of the idiot laws of over-paranoid countries.

The awesome-sounding ranger guy in question is Charlie Callagan, [email protected] . Maybe a US mapper working in this area could e-mail him and share his knowledge with OSM?

Suggest you post this to the dev@ mailing list.

Slightly surprised that, if the school is that fussed about such content in what is, after all, a fairly obscure area of the site, it hasn't installed competent filtering software. (I write as the husband of a primary school ICT subject co-ordinator and former LA primary ICT advisor!)

But language aside, I wouldn't say osm.org is particularly suitable for primary kids anyway, other than the most gifted. It's simply too complex a site. Anna tried it at a couple of schools a few years back, and effectively the only way it could work was by involving the kids heavily in the survey aspect, but for the actual editing to be strongly teacher-led.

Ideally one would build a separate app/site that talked to the API, with the kids' edits going through moderation (and change merging) before upload. That would also make it feasible to have one single account rather than one per child.

Yes, it's minutes. It's reset whenever you save. It's there to encourage you to save regularly. If you go 20 minutes without saving you'll get a little pop-up reminder too.

But the time is never "wasted". :)

Reverted it for you.

Wiki page updated.

Yep, it's a known issue which we've fixed but not deployed the fix yet.