Ten Things That Will Be Free (Jimbo Wales)
From MapbenderWiki
Jimbo spoke full of verve as one would expect from the founder of Wikipedia. Instead of starting his standard talk by asking how many people knew Wikipedia, have edited Wikipedia or have started a new Wikipedia article he proposed 10 Challenges for the Free Culture Movement in his presentation (735 kb, sorry, PDF only).
The Free Encyclopedia project having developed to a matured degree in English and German he suggested that the next topics that are to be Free will be the dictionary, curriculum, music, art and file formats. The seventh challenge is the one we have been looking for:
7. Free the Maps!
- "What could be more public domain than basic information about location on the planet? (Stefan Magdalinski)
- Free GIS software, Free GeoData
- "This will become increasingly important for open competition in mobile data services"
Googlemaps was mentioned as an example but it seems that the Wikipedia GNU/FDL license and the general rule to only directly render anything that resides *on* the Wikimedia servers will prevent a much closer relation. After the session I had theb chance to talk to Jimbo about spatial data and maps. He has definitely recognized maps and spatial data to be an all important topic but also very tedious and complex. There are still too many open issues before anything can even be started.
