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

[Andy Allan]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:46 PM, Torsten Rahn <tackat at t-online.de> wrote:

> Well, I just browsed through the announce list and to be honest I think the
> deprecation of a public API really should have been announced there a year ago
> if it was already obvious that it would get discontinued.
> Personally I'd say it should be good practice to announce the deprecation half
> a year before shutdown of the service on osm-announce.

The OSM project doesn't run high-availability APIs - there's no
guarantees, and certainly not any kind of availability guarantee when
we no longer maintain something that we used to.

If you want to use an OSM service in one of your applications, then I
would suggest firstly, and most importantly, that the application
doesn't have a *.openstreetmap.org URL embedded anywhere in the code.
It's bad practise - see
http://techfortesco.blogspot.com/2009/10/tesco-finders-towncity-search-not.html
. If your app talks to a domain under your own control, then it gives
you options to rewrite your queries and point them at a different
service.

Secondly, remember that we're an open-source, volunteer project kind
of thing, so have appropriate expectations! If the server had stopped
working and nobody was interested in fixing it, then you'd have had
zero notice. On the other hand, if you have someone who's interested
in running the namefinder service, and have the hardware and hosting
to do so, then you have more than the OSM project has on all counts
and that would be great!

Cheers,
Andy