[Osmf-talk] Death and evolution

[Robert Kaiser]

Ilya Zverev schrieb:
> Hilarious, isn't it?

To me, your doomsday scenario sounds a lot like the Linux kernel is 
working. The majority of active contribution coming from commercial 
entities that pay people to work on contribution and tools full-time, 
another good portion of casual contributors that volunteer their free 
time to help, and a small oversight group that doesn't do a lot. And 
it's a pretty successful project.

I'm not saying this is necessarily how OSM needs to work, but it's not a 
doomsday scenario from my point of view per se. The question is what 
direction we want to go in. There's a lot of money in geo services, so 
there's a lot of room for commercial contribution, which I'm happy if we 
get. I'm way more concerned about our public face, the main Mapnik map 
on osm.org, being much weaker in features than Google or Bing Maps 
offers even though our database is so much richer in data.
We make or break volunteer contributions by them getting engaged with 
us, and when they see they can't click on POIs and get info such as 
various metadata including websites or wikipedia entries, when they see 
they can't do routing there, when they see they can't do custom POI maps 
there, then many of them will not even start to engage with us. That's 
unfortunate, as our deliverable is the database and not a rich slippy 
map, but it's the truth.
And I'm not even starting on how hard it is to get the main Mapnik style 
adjusted for simple things, like 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/717 or 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/705 or 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/370 for example.

KaiRo