<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Jonathan Bennett <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:openstreetmap@jonno.cix.co.uk">openstreetmap@jonno.cix.co.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im"> On 01/09/2010 15:14, Torsten Rahn wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
And I doubt that OSM contributors<br>
see <a href="http://openstreetmap.org" target="_blank">openstreetmap.org</a> as a nice limited "Demo Version" of what a true Free<br>
Mapping portal could look like.<br>
</blockquote></div>
Actually, that's precisely what I see it as.<br></blockquote><div><br>Well, Jonathan, I think you are wrong. In a recent user survey, the features that got the most number of votes were routing, adding a scale to the map, clickable PoIs and better searching. Apart from clickable PoIs, those are all features you will find on mainstream mapping sites.<br>
<br>As for the budgets of OSMF and Wikimedia-F: A large component of that are event, travel and salary related (conferences, setting up chapters and so on). Furthermore, it's easy to convince donors to donate hardware because it's easy to check that it's not being misappropriated.<br>
<br>[1] <a href="http://osm.uservoice.com/forums/41047-general">http://osm.uservoice.com/forums/41047-general</a><br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
My opinion is this: that <a href="http://openstreetmap.org" target="_blank">openstreetmap.org</a> is to the OpenStreetMap project what <a href="http://kernel.org" target="_blank">kernel.org</a> is to the Linux Kernel project. It's the home of the project, and its where all the hard work is done, but it's not where you're expected to *use* the results.<br>
<br>
Software and data can be copied and used by as many people as possible without the original creator bearing any more costs than their initial distribution. The same can't be said of hardware resources -- there's a finite capacity on any one machine, and adding more machines costs the OSMF more money.<br>
<br>
What I don't want to see is OSMF get into the same situation as Wikimedia-F now finds itself with Wikipedia, where instead of being a project that creates Free content, it's an end-user web site that constantly needs to beg for money to pay for servers and people to run them. I'd rather organisations (commercial and non-commercial) took the content we're making and turned it into products, and supported those products with whatever business model they saw fit. It's how Linux works, and it appears to be sustainable so far. I haven't seen Canonical begging for money from Ubuntu users recently.<br>
<br>
Think of it this way: If every time someone wanted to run Marble, they did it on the servers you use to create the software, would you be able to cope?<br><font color="#888888">
<br>
Jonathan</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
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