Of course, the effects aren't equally distributed across all countries. For example, annual work hours per worker have almost halved in Germany since 1950, but only seen a more modest decrease in the US. So political factors still play a role in how the benefits of increased productivity are used by society.
But it's a strong effect. And those numbers don't even consider other factors such as how increased life expectancy combined with mostly unchanged retirement age, and being older when we first start working, give people an extra decade or two of not being part of the workforce at all.
One of the main reasons why I find the CC0 attractive is that it can be used, and is widely used, for works other than software. As a result, it seems to have better name recognition, especially outside of programmer circles, and it's nice to be able to use a single legal text for software that also contains images, audio, or similar assets. (Slapping software licenses onto media files impedes their re-use outside the context of that particular software project.)
Although I understand that using any external service provider is a potential concern, are there specific issues with Fastly's terms or practices that you consider worrisome? I'd be interested in anything we may not have fully considered when we decided to make that move.
The ability to create infinite copies for essentially zero cost changes the utility calculus significantly.
If we're talking about physical property like, say, a single-family home, the only question is which family is allowed to live in it.
If the physical world worked like copyrighted creations, we'd be able to give every family on earth a copy of that home to live in, for free. And while that would still have downsides for the heirs of the builder (with infinite supply, they could no longer rent out their own copies of the home for a profit), the total utility gained by humanity would easily justify that step.
The downside is, of course, the wildly varying style and quality, which means that finding the good images can require sifting through lower-quality content. But at least to me, that's often more useful than a comparatively tiny selection of consistently high quality art which probably just isn't going to have what I'm looking for. They also are using straightforward CC0 terms, which is always a plus compared to custom licenses.
I would have a lot more sympathy for this effort if it wasn't for the misleading marketing. So you are selling software with a free 32-day trial? Nothing wrong with that. You're also allowing non-commercial users to use and modify their software for free? That's nice, and probably even makes sense financially if your market is mostly business users anyway.
But then you just have to use a name and logo that's strongly reminiscent of the CC-Zero and brand yourselves "a new way to support open software developers". Except the "prosperity" license is not actually an open source license, and devs using it for their software are therefore not open source developers.
The PR surrounding it follows the same pattern. It very much feels as if you are trying to benefit from the positive reputation that open source has built. Yes, the information is all there if you read the license text or readme, but it still seems intentionally designed to give an incorrect first impression to people who don't look too closely. Which is probably most people.
I share the desire to permanently own media. Amazon have been selling music as DRM-free mp3 files since 2008, though, so that option is already available from a legal, mainstream online shop.
Just make sure you don't misremember it as "seasons.sharper.scans" (notice the "s" at the end) or you end up in Russia. One of the benefits of Plus Codes is that similar codes are close to each other.
Besides, what3words makes you dependent on a proprietary database to map the words to coordinates, which as as far as I'm concerned is an instant deal breaker.
Firefox search keywords are awesome! They can be much shorter than bangs because there's no need to avoid name conflicts with thousands of sites you aren't using. Plus, no exclamation mark, and you can use them for sites at work which aren't publicly visible.
Business vandalism is certainly a plausible threat for OSM. Something we've also had to deal with are political issues escalating into edit wars, i.e. where the border between countries is supposed to be, which language the labels on a contested part of the map should be in and so on.
I think it's good to keep in mind that OSM already has moderation, though, just not in the shape of a formalized approval process. Instead, edits go live instantly – but are inspected, discussed and possibly undone afterwards. So while vandalism does get through at first, it will hopefully be short-lived enough that it does not pay off for the vandal.
Ultimately, I believe it comes down to weighing priorities based on the project's current needs. OSM's current approach lowers the bar for contributors and rewards them with instant gratification when the change is visible on the map right away. Because of that, I believe it makes sense when your focus is on growing the community. Stricter moderation makes sense once the primary focus switches from growth to preserving the valuable database you've already built.
Looking at Wikipedia, for example, they started out with a setup resembling OSM's current model, and switched to a more strict moderation process only once they had grown large enough to become the world's default encyclopedia.
Based on my personal experiences in OSM, vandalism is not yet a big enough problem to justify stricter moderation practices. But of course that is a matter of opinion to some degree.
Exports for countries and smaller regions (in the .osm.pbf Protobuf format as well as some others) are typically provided by third party services such as Geofabrik's download server: https://download.geofabrik.de/
It's linked from the "export" tab on osm.org, but could probably be made more visible.
As far as APIs for OSM raw data go, Overpass API is the most popular open source option. The osm.org API is neither suitable nor intended for building non-editing apps.
When it comes to keeping a rendering database current, of course, most people use the minutely diffs mentioned by rmc.
CC0 can be used for source code. For example, the FSF lists it as a GPL-compatible free software license and states: "If you want to release your work to the public domain, we recommend you use CC0."
Yes, it has led to a significant reduction in hours worked: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
Of course, the effects aren't equally distributed across all countries. For example, annual work hours per worker have almost halved in Germany since 1950, but only seen a more modest decrease in the US. So political factors still play a role in how the benefits of increased productivity are used by society.
But it's a strong effect. And those numbers don't even consider other factors such as how increased life expectancy combined with mostly unchanged retirement age, and being older when we first start working, give people an extra decade or two of not being part of the workforce at all.