[Osmf-talk] seeking funding ideas

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 29 April 2010 14:45, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Morten Kjeldgaard wrote:
> I dislike it for several reasons. Two of them are
>
> (a) We have no "main OSM map", on purpose. We are not a map drawing
> project. What exactly would we be selling to sponsors - would they not
> come and complain that their company logo is not on the cycle map, or
> not on the Cloudmade tiles, or not on the tiles at home map?

I'd be happy to set it up as a commercial entity not related to osmf,
it sounds like all it would need is a reliable hosting and some
advertising through the normal channels, e.g. google ads.  But it
would help it succeed if the layer could at least appear on the
osm.org homepage as a non-default layer.

So pros:
 * with enough funds the hosting could be really reliable and could
have guaranteed uptime like google's and be free to use for the
different applications that currently don't have where to take tiles
from.  I don't know what Cloudmade's policy is but here it loads way
slower than tiles.osm.org, so imho that's one thing that nobody is
offering yet.
 * the style could be identical to the default style at osm.org just
with the addition of business logos, so people could still use it to
see if what they just edited was tagged okay, especially if the tiles
load faster than tiles.osm.org.
 * businesses that don't want to pay or haven't paid yet, could still
submit their logo or even mappers could do it but it would show up
black and grey instead of full colour.  Google maps showing the
McDonald's logo instead of the map just saying "McDonald's" like
mapnik, is quite helpful even if McDonald's is not paying them.  The
problem here would be taking care to not misuse trademarked logos.
 * funds that haven't been used up for hosting or ads, could go to
osmf as a donation.

Cons:
 * if it was to appear on the home page it would still favour one
business compared to others (but maybe the cyclemap tiles being hosted
at a cloudmade address is already a way of favouring someone).
 * Frederik's point (b) where people tag for the renderer.
 * anyone could offer a similar service and then the customers
wouldn't be getting much from the deal because website owners could
massively switch away.
 * perhaps more things I haven't thought about.

Cheers