[Osmf-talk] Data Was: Re: Tiles

[Mikel Maron]

Thanks Paul. Right. I'm not sure why we're still talking about the raster tiles. Certainly we need to be prepared if something changes in the support for this infrastructure. The OWG has considered all sides of this closely and made a wise decision.

Rather if we're going to debate OSM features and resources (and I don't know if there's actual value in doing that right now in this forum), we might turn to something like GPS traces. I'm not clear at all if this is still a valuable service to mappers as people make edits. The last several months uploads are all from a single automated looking service integration. Not sure what kind of resources are dedicated to processing and serving GPS traces on a regular basis. But last night the level of GPS uploads caused some access issues to general OSM services.

-Mikel

* Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron






On Monday, June 5, 2023 at 02:12:19 AM EDT, Paul Norman via osmf-talk <osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org> wrote: 





On 2023-06-04 7:31 p.m., Steve Coast wrote:

> When we’re told that other sites are a small fraction this is indeed 
> true but sidesteps a well known problem in long tail statistics - what 
> happens when you add up all the other sites? If you add them all up 
> there are ~10k/requests a second across the data given.

This is not what you're told. "The vast majority of use from non-OSM 
sources is very small websites" is what I said earlier in this thread. 
When I did my SOTM 2021 presentation on the usage of the Standard layer, 
about 50% of the general website traffic was from sites with under 1 
tile per second average. https://i.imgur.com/ACYjBPP.png is a treemap. 
Although the details have changed since then, the big categories should 
be similar.

> So it’s fair to say OSM is giving away ~80-90% of our tiles to non-OSM 
> users. I wonder if our hosts actually know this? 

The fact that tiles are widely used has helped with some of the in-kind 
donations for the Standard tile layer. These donations could not be used 
for other purposes.


> Which brings us neatly to the theory that it’s all fine because 
> someone is doing this for free. It strikes me this is like saying the 
> roads are free because the government is paying for them. But more 
> precisely, OSM(F) has an opportunity cost where donations (80-90% in 
> this case could) be better managed or spent. It has a cost in terms of 
> relationship and management. It’s not free at all.

Shutting down the Standard tile layer would save about 3% of the OSMF 
budget. Your numbers have no relation to what the actual costs are, 
either financial or time.



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