[Imports] Heads up: Building Canada 2020

Christoph Hormann osm at imagico.de
Wed Oct 18 23:08:20 UTC 2017


On Thursday 19 October 2017, James wrote:
> Frederik, I completely agree that OSM costs money to maintain and
> that the servers will require additional disk space to hold
> information. But to say give us money because you are adding a lot of
> geo-information to an open source project to make it more detailed
> seems border line blackmail.

No, calling this blackmail is like saying if i send a customer a bill 
for services rendered that would be blackmail.

Statistics Canada apparently wants something from OSM, namely to add and 
maintain data for them and permanently provide it to interested parties 
for the forseeable future.  It is completely appropriate to ask for 
something in return.

Of course it is possible that Statistics Canada is trying to find people 
who do all the footwork for them for free - and from an economic 
standpoint that kind of makes sense.  That is the decision of every 
individual involved then.  But this does not mean the rest of the OSM 
community and the OSMF have to fall in line behind them.

Ultimately this has also a lot to do with public image.  Statistics 
Canada has to decide if they want to purpuse their formal goal at 
minimum costs at the risk of appearing to be ruthless and abusive of 
the OSM community or if they want to pursue this in open and honest 
dialogue with everyone in OSM to the mutural benefit of all.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/



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