That is great news that it is official. Thanks!

Thanks for all the comments!

@Zverik - The vast majority of imports (probably over 95%) are detectable. However, a knowledgeable person that wishes to make the import hard to detect certainly can. Obliviously, it is impossible to know how often this happens.

@Stereo - I agree that the fact that the term isn’t clearly defined is interesting.

@DevonshireBoy42 - I have no plans on what to do with the detector and we will see if it goes anywhere useful.

@Glassman - Pulling road names from Tiger is a kind of import, but it doesn’t need to follow the import guidelines we all know that it is OK because Tiger is public domain. However, pulling road names from google, isn’t ok. For small imports we skip the import guidelines and deal with them by reverting them after the fact if they have problems.

Finally, the word “directly” would exclude tracing over an image layer.

Hi Thanks for commenting.

• I fixed the SOTM. Thanks for pointing that out.

I don’t see any reason why the servers would need to move. OSMF would still be a non-profit, the money would be used to support the project, and we would simply be asking for donations for heavy tiles or Nominatim use.

The foundation needs to have money to purchase computers, bandwidth, electricity, (and most importantly) system system administrators. The vibrant commercial space that is downstream validates the tremendous value that is inherent to our data. I don’t see any reason that we should not be capturing some of that value to self fund the project. Selling services would also avoid the conflict of interest problems we currently have with pure donations model. It seems really simple to me.

@roym, my post clearly explains why Mapbox and Microsoft can’t put the sat images into BitTorrent. Also, Facebook has released the AI part of the road detection code here https://github.com/facebookresearch/Detectron. Nothing is stopping you from getting involved.

On the Facebook road import, as someone who works on this kind of stuff, the code they wrote is really not that interesting. What we (OSM) should of asked for is the hand drawn training images. They are the most valuable part of what Facebook created. Looking at the training images and noting how many they had would of given the community a pretty good idea on how well the final data was going to eventually look.