[Osmf-talk] Death and evolution

[Paul Norman]

On 9/26/2014 9:38 AM, Clifford Snow wrote:
> Instead of waiting for for profit corporations to develop tools, we 
> fund that development
We're hardly waiting. MapBox has funded iD development, as well as a 
number of non-OSM specific software components that are useful for OSM. 
At MapQuest we've been doing work on osm2pgsql, which is one of the core 
components of a standard OSM rendering server. Mapnik, the library most 
people use to render OSM data, has had development done by both MapBox 
and MapQuest. Telenav has done a lot of development work on MapRoulette 
and other QA tools.

For the self-employed, it's harder to say where work ends and personal 
activities begin, but both the jsrouting branch and the 
openstreetmap-carto stylesheet could fall under this.

I would not say that the WMF model for funding development has been a 
great success. That's not to say that there's nothing good about their 
model, but

The OSMF has a working group for fostering development - the Engineering 
Working Group. Its meetings are open and held Mondays at 17:30 UTC in 
#osm-ewg on IRC. Meetings tend to be fairly quiet.

In a related topic, I've wondered if we need a funding WG, both for 
growing incoming funding as required and for taking the load off of the 
people who would prefer not to handle funding, but end up doing so 
anyways. I'm rusty with the WG formation process, but I think anyone 
interested should email management at osmfoundation.org. I'd be willing to 
help get such a WG set up, but my talents aren't raising funds.