[OSM-talk] Re: [OSM-dev] MassGIS dataset

[Tom Carden]

On 04/06/06, Johnny Doe <uucp1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Tom Carden <tom at tom-carden.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > (to promote the long-term vision and sustainability
> > of the project to
> > people who can help most).
> ...
> >
> > The planet will not stop turning if planet.osm is
> > late.
>
> It will. You are simply losing credibility even in the
> eyes of the people who contributed a lot of data
> to this project. What "long-term vision of
> sustainability" we are talking about

One where there is funding to sort out the hardware, pay for hosting
and bandwidth, pay for a lawyer to sort out licensing and privacy
issues, pay for a designer to fix the site layout and logo, pay for a
writer to fix the documentation, etc. etc.

> if
> 1. the 20-30 tracks are regulary stuck in the
> input queue for several days,

Presumably there is a bug we haven't found yet.  Would you rather the
site was a closed beta?

> 2. the project needs MONTHS to add the TIGER
> shapefiles to the database,

If we had the whole of Europe to the same level of detail in a few
months, I would be ecstatic.  The fact that the TIGER import uses the
API at a rate greater than the rate real people are editing right now
is a really useful test of functionality.  Of course we could import
it faster if we did it directly to the database... we *chose* not to.

> 3. the project can't provide a MONTHLY dump
>   of just 100.000 polylines ?
>

I agree that this doesn't look very credible.  But I could easily add
10 things to the list, probably more.  So what?  There are many more
good things which outweigh the bad.

I truly believe that Steve as a blocking point on this is a temporary
matter until the Foundation is organised.  Please just be patient, and
if things aren't happening quickly enough, please help with the
foundation, or organising the wiki (it's not that great) or sorting
out and prioritising the open tickets on trac.

Tom.