Summary

  • OpenStreetMap's 9 July 2012 notice said a bot would redact contributions incompatible with the new Contributor Terms and Open Database Licence from the live database. It put the affected share below 1% and identified a final pre-redaction Planet file under the old CC-BY-SA licence.
  • The project's 26 July report said the global automated pass had finished, more than 99% of data was retained, and losses were concentrated in places including Poland and Australia. It also said the live database had changed while the licence itself had not.
  • The OpenStreetMap Foundation board minutes record a 5 September approval after the working groups reviewed the redaction. The project switched the licence at 9am UK time on 12 September; the new XML Planet file appeared on 14 September after taking longer to generate than expected.

The map was working while the legal plan was still in testing

A map is not a document that can be stamped and filed away. A road network has a live API, historical versions, editors adding detail, and outsiders downloading a whole copy to run their own maps and routes. OpenStreetMap's change from Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike to the Open Database Licence had to work in all those places at once. A sentence changing the legal terms could not make an incompatible contribution vanish from a running map.

In April 2012, the project said its redaction bot was still failing some system tests. The planned sequence was test server, then an isolated portion of the live database, probably Ireland, then the rest if that test worked. That order mattered: the bot would touch the record on which mappers, renderers and other data users relied. The organisation delayed the licence change until it had a machine that could carry out the decision without breaking the service wholesale.

The 9 July announcement moved from rehearsal to a conditional start that week. It described the incompatible contributions as less than 1% of the database, said they would no longer be accessible, and set a geographic order: Ireland, the UK, Western Europe, North America, Australia, then the rest. An 11 July start was expected if final setup succeeded; the notice did not certify that the bot actually started that day. The project also said there would be no API outage. The intended operation was surgery on a living record.

Less than one percent can still be the road you needed

The bot's job was narrower than deleting every contribution from a person who declined the new terms. It had to leave the current map compatible with the new licence while respecting which work could be carried forward. The 9 July notice said redacted material would become inaccessible through both the API and the website's browse pages. OpenStreetMap also generated a final pre-redaction Planet snapshot under the old CC-BY-SA terms. That file preserved the old publication state for people entitled to use it under the old licence; it did not make the old and new live datasets interchangeable.

On 26 July, the project said the automated pass had swept the world and finished the day before. More than 99% of data was retained. That global fraction tells little about a particular journey. The same announcement singled out Poland and Australia as places where redaction was concentrated. A mapper who needs one bridge or one segment of a road cannot cross a statistical percentage. The project asked people to remap affected areas and said the live database was largely ready for ODbL. It added a vital timestamp: the licence had not changed yet.

That gap between July and September is the story. The organisation altered what its running system would return before it could make the new licence effective. In the interim, users saw a map shaped for a legal future that had not yet arrived. Contributors whose work could not be carried forward had an effect on the live map; other contributors had to repair missing detail. Neither outcome was produced by wording alone. A software process, tests and working-group review turned the foundation's intended terms into an operationally publishable record.

The board waited for a clean database

The 5 September board minutes show exactly what the trustees were being asked to approve. The Licensing Working Group said the Data Working Group had completed redaction runs and believed the live published database clean. It said reported cases from the main run had been investigated. On that basis it recommended changing the published geodata licence to ODbL 1.0. The board accepted the recommendation and voted unanimously for the change. The minutes also ruled out a dual-licence interval.

The approved plan tied the first published ODbL version to the next full Planet dump, then expected on 12 September. This was a board decision about the output of a working data system, not a magic power to change an old copy in someone else's server. The working groups could report that the live database met the migration condition. The board could authorise the change. Data users still had to decide what to do with their local copies and update streams.

OpenStreetMap's 11 September instructions made that last problem explicit. The API and incremental diffs would switch with the licence. Consumers were told not to mix a Planet file published under the old terms with incremental changes from the new one. They were to purge old data, load the new ODbL Planet and then consume ODbL diffs. A map provider running its own renderer or routing engine needed a migration, not merely a revised attribution line.

The legal switch was punctual; the big file was late

The project announced the ODbL switch at 9am UK time on 12 September. The new XML Planet file did not appear on the initial approximate thirty-hour schedule. An update on the same announcement says it became available around 18:30 UTC on Friday 14 September. The large snapshot took longer to generate than expected. Data users who relied on a full fresh copy and then a stream of diffs had a second clock to watch after the legal one.

The sequence exposes the real work behind a shared database. In April, a licence change was waiting on tests. In July, a bot removed incompatible material from the live map and mappers began patching local gaps. In September, a working-group recommendation reached the board, the board authorised the new terms, the API changed, and the full download arrived later. The OpenStreetMap Foundation could decide what licence to publish under. It needed a clean running record and a usable distribution path before that decision meant the same thing at the editing screen, the API and the map consumer's server.