Robert Schusters Blog

Now this is cool!

Yesterday I learned about a club in my city that exclusivly plays CreativeCommons-licensed music. According to their website they also make sure that only those variants of the CC-licenses are used that free software people would identify as ‘free’

Tommorrow there will be a party where they celebrate the adaption of the latest CC-BY-SA (version 3.0) to the German jurisdiction. They use a CC-BY-SA licensed excerpt from OpenStreetMap on their flyer:

Damn, I find it so cool when people combine all those free as in freedom things! In my opinion this is exactly the goal we wanted to achieve with the free software movement and which many of its naysayers and opponents did not get.

And while talking about OpenStreetMap. Here are two examples from OSM which shows that this effort has so much potentiality in being vastly superior than existing proprietary map data.

The first screenshot is from the area around the city train station Ostkreuz (some 500m from my home):

Noticed those crossed quads connected by grey lines which start in the west of the Lenbachplatz? Those are overhead power lines. So imagine if you want to move within Berlin and want to avoid living besides those, just scan the area with OSM first.

The next example is from the Teufelsberg (a hill) which lies within the Grunewald forest:

Some really hard-working people (perhaps its just one who knows) have mapped all the footways in the forest surrounding the hill. If you look up the same spot on the proprietary Google Maps you will only see a large green area with no ways drawn in.

Well done OpenStreetMap!

Now imagine every place on the planet would have such incredible accuracy and you do not need to sign a contract with anyone to use that data in any way you want: This is what we mean with “free as in freedom”.