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

Matt Amos zerebubuth at gmail.com
Sat Sep 4 18:55:24 BST 2010


On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 10:14 AM, Nic Roets <nroets at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 5:20 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> > You'd want me to spend $12 a day to provide geolocalisation for an
>> > OSM editor (if you didn't read the thread, I remind you I'm speaking
>> > of Merkaartor)!!??
>>
>> What sort of crazy hosting costs $360 per month (asking Nic Roets)? I
>
> I said $12 a day for a server that can provide a decent routing service.
> (EC2 High Memory Instance).
>
> The kernel.org analogy is not really valid. They don't call themselves the
> "wiki kernel". When I hack a kernel for an embedded project running on
> specialized hardware, they certainly are interested in my changes.
>
> By contrast, we will accept users who come in and make a few changes,
> spending as little as 10 minutes.

are you saying that kernel.org can be unfriendly because the amount of
effort put in by each contributor is higher? i don't think that's the
right way to look at it - kernel.org doesn't need to showcase the
capabilities of linux because there are many other providers and
distributions doing this. the people who are using linux, for example
on an android phone, don't need to know about kernel.org, and don't
need to care. the people who are using ubuntu don't need to know about
kernel.org, since ubuntu provides almost all of their needs. in my
opinion it can be the same with osm.org - people can be using the data
(for example, on bing, mapquest or cloudmade) without ever needing to
see the osm.org site. those who are interested enough to want to
contribute can do it directly through the provider, or be directed to
osm.org.

> So we need to make the environment as
> friendly as possible.

i wouldn't disagree with you there, and providing routing on the main
page might make the experience slightly nicer, but it comes with a
cost to OSM in terms of developing, integrating and running the
service which is non-zero. anyone who's interested in getting a
service on the front page has to make it as friendly as possible, not
just to the users, but also to the admins.

my suggestion for getting anything integrated with the main site is to
set up a patched rails port* and your running service on dev.osm.org,
announce it and keep it up to date for a while. when people have been
using it, and it's clear that it's stable and what computational and
admin requirements it has, it has a much higher chance of being
integrated into the main page.

cheers,

matt

* it has to be a rails port and not a static page. either integrating
it into rails port is easy (in which case you can do it - it's easy)
or it's hard (in which case there's a big barrier to getting it
adopted, so you should do it to make it easier to integrate).



More information about the dev mailing list