I'm going to speak as "moderator emeritus".

While I think collecting and organizing the Maptech raster charts is a
good thing, failing to point out a very real and direct connection with
the collection offered for sale is not so good. I'm not the only one
confused on this last point - there's been some back-channel discussion
of this matter and the consensus is the involvment was not clearly
stated and that is not how things are done on Baba-L. In fact, direct
commercial activity has very much been constrained for all of Baba-L's
history. Quite simply, anyone wishing to make a profit from the use of
Baba-L as an advertising medium had best plan on putting some of that
profit into Baba-L. Anything less is not accepted.

Additionally, I suggest reviewing Maptech's terms and conditions for
providing the charts. I suspect they do not encourage resale of their
data. The charts, that is the cartographic data on the Maptech charts,
may be in the public domain but Maptech's value-added data (i.e.,
rasterization of NOAA charts) is probably not in the public domain.

All in all, nice try and full marks for the effort but not so many marks
for considering the announcement's content and this forum's traditions.

Richard B. Emerson
Founding moderator, Baba-L




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Received on Thu Dec 01 19:26:05 2005