[Marble-devel] [OSM-dev] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired

[Matt Amos]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:05 PM, Nic Roets <nroets at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:05 PM, Matt Amos <zerebubuth at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Is there a list available of APIs and services that OSM provides which
>> > are
>> > considered "enterprise ready"? In terms of  "enterprise ready" I'd
>> > expect a
>> > few commitments to be made, most importantly:
>>
>> i don't think any of the services OSM provides are "enterprise ready".
>> OSM runs these services as aids to mapping and to show what can be
>> done with the data. all of the software used to run OSM services is
>> free, so any enterprise needing those services can run them itself.
>
> Matt, my calculations show that running such services is an extremely cheap
> way of improving the OSM database. Serving a query can cost as little as
> 0.00001 cent. So if there is just a one percent chance that the data
> underlying the query is wrong and if only 1 in 100 users actually decides to
> fix the data, then the cost to fix one mistake is still less than one cent.
> Compare that to the fuel cost of someone driving just one block to capture
> an unnamed street.

absolutely. but you're missing the opportunity cost of using that
hardware to run other services which might work better, or give new
abilities. note that no-one is saying that OSM should do without a
geocoding server - nominatim is that service and (to my knowledge)
there are no plans to retire it. it's simply that namefinder, as a
secondary, older, geocoder takes some hardware to run that could be
put to better purposes.

>> alternatively, a commercial service from one of the companies selling
>> OSM-based services might be willing to give an "enterprise" guarantee.
>
> Let me just mention to Torsten that you have conflict of interest here: Your
> employer is such a company.

not since november - the london development team was let go due to
lack of funding. for the last 9 months my employer is someone entirely
unrelated to OSM.

> Torsten, I think the option you would be more interested in would be to run
> the software on your own servers, or to collaborate with the providers of
> such services that use open source software.

which is pretty much what i was saying, thanks ;-)

cheers,

matt