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

[Courtney]

To Andy's good point - I moved this to the community forum:

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/what-are-the-costs-vs-utility-of-the-tile-servers-to-the-osm-community/120403

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 11:19 AM Edward Bainton <bainton.ete at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>>>
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>
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