[Osmf-talk] false Microsoft "big dollars" rumour

Harry Wood mail at harrywood.co.uk
Fri Apr 20 04:26:17 UTC 2012


> An official (on the OSMF blog, not OSM wiki!) list of donors would be 

> very good to be grateful to all of them. It also makes it easier to show 
> that OSM isn't Microsoft's, nor it's secret weapon, but that have 
> organisations have supported OSM just as much/more.


Maybe. Although looking at it another way, *having* such a list might send out a message to casual visitors that we're massively under the influence of big evil corporations. But you're not wrong. I can see advantages and disadvantages of a major donors list. We discussed it a bit in the CWG meeting (draft minutes: http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/CWG_meeting_2012-04-16 )  and we'll discuss it some more. Certainly haven't ruled it out.

> If you've got something like this, then the community can do the time 
> consuming work of telling every journalist/article they are wrong, while 
> providing a citation.


Except that the absence of Microsoft mentioned on a list of donors doesn't adequately disprove the rumour. This is a weird kind of rumour. In future we might hit the same situation, but more likely we'll need to dynamically deal with other weird rumours.  RichardF was actually quite quickly forthcoming with a mailing list post which would serve as a citation surely? I think a blog post would have been an over-reaction, even if we'd done it a few weeks back, and certainly would be now. 

I have to say I was surprised that Frederik raised this issue and various others discussed it, yet nobody got around to actually posting a comment on the original pcworld article mentioned. We do rely on the community to do the time consuming work of correcting journalists e.g. by posting comments at least. I posted on here in the end, but that came over a week after the article appeared: http://www.pcworld.com/article/252649/microsofts_secret_weapon_against_google_maps_open_source.html   
I'd say everyone please go forth and post correcting comments like this when journalists are wrong, but keep it positive!

Harry




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