[Osmf-talk] What Are the Costs VS Utility of the Tile Servers to the OSM community.

[Courtney]

I am putting the question below in a new thread, as it doesn't have to do
with the AGM, but does seem like a topic that bears discussing. The
question isn't "what are the technical benefits of the tile servers?" That
is a different topic.  This is about the overall value of the tile servers
versus the costs of maintaining them.

C

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 10:15 AM Steve Coast <steve at stevecoast.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Oct 20, 2024, at 5:19 AM, Mikel Maron <mikel.maron at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In 2023, we organized a successful fundraising campaign
> https://blog.openstreetmap.org/category/organisation/fundraising/ (the
> total announced results were £373,000, not sure if that's the source of the
> $300k figure).
>
>
> Yes, and that is genuinely great, but the question is what do we get for
> the money?
>
> The major output remains the free global tile server, where something like
> 99% of the usage is by third parties and not OSM. We create our own funding
> requirement and dedicate our sysadmin time to running this thing despite
> completely free alternatives now existing (e.g. https://openfreemap.org/ )
> and then celebrate the “growth” of our “service”.
>
> We could use these resources to, for example, complete the map.
>
> It seems cheaper and more effective marketing to run a free OpenStreetMap
> coffee and hot dog stand in Times Square, New York City.
>
> Best
>
> Steve
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