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

[Nic Roets]

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Jonathan Bennett <
openstreetmap at jonno.cix.co.uk> wrote:

>  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.
>

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.

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.

[1] http://osm.uservoice.com/forums/41047-general


> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> dev at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
>
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