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

[Edward Bainton]

Question for info and not as a challenge:

What would be the route into mapping for newbies if there were no
tile-servers? If retiring them means retiring the map at openstreetmap.org,
I know I would never have got into it. (But maybe that would have been a
good thing <https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/1907943>  ;-)

On Sun, 20 Oct 2024 at 16:06, Courtney <courtney.williamson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> osmf-talk mailing list
>> osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk
>>
> _______________________________________________
> osmf-talk mailing list
> osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/attachments/20241020/59dfc8d8/attachment.htm>