tordanik
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.
Is there an alternative you'd recommend?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#CC0
Creative Commons themselves have published a FAQ entry on the matter:
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC...