[sbma44]

In general the OSM community errs on the side of vetoing new initiatives -- doing an import properly means raising it on the mailing lists, which invariably attracts vastly more criticism than assistance. Even coordinated (non-automated) remote mapping attracts considerable criticism these days -- most ludicrously, by people suggesting that it's better to leave an area unmapped so that it might one day attract local mappers (rather than remote contributors who will work on it immediately).

There's also the question of the license. Without opening a can of worms about the usefulness of sharealike provisions in general, I think it's safe to say that making a geocoding result trigger sharealike implications in a database is clearly problematic (consider geocoding a database of customer addresses, then being obliged to share the rest of the table!). Unfortunately OSM hasn't yet reached agreement on a geocoding guidance. Consequently a couple dozen of us working on OpenAddresses have gotten the project to over 200 million addresses in less than 2 years. OSM is now a decade old, has millions of registered mappers, and contains less than 60 million addresses.

I don't mean to be all doom and gloom, though. I would love to improve OSM as a home for address data. And I urge those of you who care about this incredibly important resource to join me -- hop on the talk and legal-talk lists and help make the case for a geocoding guidance that makes sense.

[rmc]

> In general the OSM community errs on the side of vetoing new initiatives

"New initiatives" are fine. "new bulk data imports" are a different thing. There are many social and technical problems with importing data. De-duplicating data is hard.

OSM, unlike OpenAddresses, wants to have one licence for all the data, rather than lots of little licences for each different region. OSM also (tries) to have one hierachial, address data format for the whole world, rather than a collection of different formats for each region.

> OSM is now a decade old, has millions of registered mappers, and contains less than 60 million addresses.

OSM is more than just addresses.