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<p>Andy, you are right, if you accept that the 3 or 4 people who have participated in this discussion are representative of OSM at large. But the most active inhabitants of this list and others are limited to maybe 10 people, who frequently use authoritative-sounding language like "we are not doing it" and "it has no place in OSM" without the merest hint of "IMHO". I am not naming any names, and I don't want to get into any personal arguments, but it is a general frustration I have with the discussions on these lists.</p>
<p>There may be many arguments against w3w in OSM, but I was kind of hoping that some of the attacks would also apply objectively to other entities which are or are not mapped in OSM. On-the-ground visibility was mentioned, and that is spurious in the sense that there are many other things in OSM which are not visible and are yet tolerated. Being proprietary was mentioned, but it is not really much more proprietary than the coordinates of UK postcodes used to be, and we were happily reverse-engineering them and adding them to point addresses and deriving district boundaries from that data. Through all that effort the proprietary nature (and the commercial value) of the PAF was to some extent diluted, and now a lot of this information is publicly available. Only time will tell if w3w takes off commercially. Right now they have had $5m of funding and have an impressive list of partners.</p>
<p>--colin</p>
<p>On 2015-11-22 14:01, ajt1047@gmail.com wrote:</p>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 22/11/2015 12:51, Colin Smale wrote:</div>
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<div class="pre" style="margin: 0; padding: 0; font-family: monospace;">...and once again, as seems to be the norm in OSM, any minority interest which is not supported by the oligarchy gets mercilessly shot down.</div>
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<br /> ... except it's not _just_ the "oligarchy", is it? No-one on this list seems to have a good word for the original idea.<br /><br /> Cheers,<br /><br /> Andy (SomeoneElse)<br /><!-- html ignored --><br />
<div class="pre" style="margin: 0; padding: 0; font-family: monospace">_______________________________________________<br /> talk mailing list<br /><a href="mailto:talk@openstreetmap.org">talk@openstreetmap.org</a><br /><a href="https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk">https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk</a></div>
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