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

[Jonathan Bennett]

  On 01/09/2010 15:14, Torsten Rahn wrote:
> And I doubt that OSM contributors
> see openstreetmap.org as a  nice limited "Demo Version" of what a true Free
> Mapping portal could look like.
Actually, that's precisely what I see it as.

My opinion is this: that openstreetmap.org is to the OpenStreetMap 
project what kernel.org 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.

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.

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.

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?

Jonathan