I get that the OSM community is trying to practice something equivalent to a clean room reimplementation, but that's equivalent to a person in the "cleanroom" being shown a public domain code library and then a file from that same library, but taken out of a ROM dump. Yes, they saw the copyrighted file, but they also saw the public domain file so they're entirely within their right to base their reimplementation either partially or fully on it.
But yes, it may seem a little confusing that even though you can do X, it may not be appropriate.
I think that's also why people are upset in this case. They actually did try to protect themselves from power grabs, only to find themselves cheated.
By the way, there's a Danish mailing list for OSM. I don't know if you explained the issue there, but if you did, I think it's likely someone would have made the correction for you relatively quickly.
What was the problem? Why isn't that legal?
At best it's a breach of GMaps ToS by that user. And in this case the user attached a photo they took. The screenshots are just noise.
And since its a community consensus thing, people will wait a few days to reintroduce a change once it has been challenged unless the challenge is obviously unreasonable. It's not like a change being delayed a few days is some unreasonable big punishment, it's just part of QA process to run. Maybe wasn't strictly necessary here, but it's a really obvious warning signal to trip.
(To make a (admittedly stretched) software analogy, if you submit a PR somewhere and show disassembly from the Windows kernel as evidence that it's a good algorithm others also use, it'll also cause some concern, and you would've been better of just showing your solution on its own)
https://www.openstreetmap.org/welcome
"Unless you have special permission, don't copy from online or paper maps."
I mean, we own the map rights. Google had to seek permission from us to map our area and publish it.
This had a huge impact on us. With thousands of employees and citizens calling our IT support staff of 5 people every day.
When I used our OSM official “City off X” account to fix it, I was an utter idiot and submitted both a real life picture I took myself as well as a Google maps and a krak maps (Danish map service) screenshots. I didn’t know this wasn’t legal, because I was an idiot, but it resulted in our fix getting reversed and a week long discussion with the OSM community members about fixing the damn street.
We made the street one way. But we couldn’t fix it in an OSS map service because the community wouldn’t let us because we made a stupid mistake.
We’ve now switched our services to Krak. But I can promise you that if we had, had the admin power to force our chance through during those days, we wouldn’t have given any regards to the OSS community.
If an popular tool wasn’t working within the .Net framework CLA I imagine the process would be somewhat similar inside Microsoft.
It’s just one of those things where the OSS community processes and Enterprise process of “get this fixed right now, at any cost by any means, ignoring every standard we may have, just get it fixed, now. Then make sure it never happens again.” that happens every now and then when the beast awakens, clashes. I’m not sure how you can avoid it, as Enterprise will never want to comply with OSS processes when it’s in a hurry.