[Strategic] Server hardware donation offer

[Tom Hughes]

On 11/02/11 11:12, Eugene Usvitsky wrote:

> As far as I understand, the decision is"Will OSMF use these servers?".
> The real usage is not so important - you better know how and where
> core services and supporting services should be hosted. But the
> situation "Rambler provides official servers for global OpenStreetMap
> project" differs from "Russian OSM community is hosting something on
> Rambler's servers". We should understand that PR and promotion is
> currently the only one thing Rambler can really get back for its help
> and thus official support form OSMF would be much better.

We, the TWG, don't really want to be involved directly with the day to
day running of things like lots of tile caches and XAPI mirrors.

Whether the OSMF choose to style tile caches and XAPI mirrors as being
official "OSMF resources" is up to them. My view would be that if they
are behind the GeoDNS we plan to use so that they are answering queries
for tile.openstreetmap.org etc then they are in some sense OSMF resources.

> From my personal point of view, tile cache and XAPI are important, as
> well as planet mirror, but should not it also be used for OSM sandbox?

You can probably already do a planet mirror if you talk to Grant about
setting it up - we already have other sites doing that for us.

> For second Mapnik (with the same style and stuff, just as a mirror for
> the main)? 

That's not something we're looking to mirror right now, though we do
have our eye on it. Most likely that would initially be done to another
machine in the UK though.

> For some additional projects like official maps
> convertation for several navigation software like Garmin? For daily
> .osm files for each country, similar to CloudMade's and Geofabrik's?
> For internal router and data quality checker? There are countless
> possible uses.

Nobody's stopping you doing things like that. If the board want to
official bless them as the "official OSMF Garmin Downloads" etc then
that is up to them.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/