[OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap Pledge

[Tom Carden]

On 30/05/06, Christopher Schmidt <crschmidt at crschmidt.net> wrote:
> If someone sets up a way for me to obtain, nightly, the worldwide output
> of the getnodes function for the whole world, and the corresponding
> getlines call from those returned nodes (as described in the file
> dao.rb), before the 10th of June, I will donate $200 towards the
> OpenStreetMap project.

Before the 10th of June, so you can show it at Where 2.0?  ;)

This pledge is enticing, but it raises lots of questions.

Would planet.osm be adequate if the frequency was daily and not
monthly?  Steve - how long does it take to generate planet.osm at the
moment?

People have been asking for a full db dump, that Steve hasn't done
yet, for whatever reasons, for ages now.  I think we await OSMF, and
lawyers, and proper privacy policy, before distributing the data in
full.

> I will also, from this data, set up a rendered version of OpenStreetMap,
> in a tiled instance of OpenLayers, on hardware that can support a lot of
> traffic,

Cool - I would use this straight away.

How long does it take you to generate tiles from planet.osm now?  Or
do you generate them on the fly?  (And if so, why can't it be done on
OSM's servers on the fly?).

I think any work that goes into this should also be re-used on
openstreetmap.org - the main site should always have the best possible
maps that can be generated from OSM data (it's behind at the moment,
but catching up thanks to Nick) because it's really the only place
that can drive traffic back to the editors.  Feedback is golden.

Does OpenLayers have a place to link to data providers, like
Google/Yahoo/MS do in their APIs?  That would be essential IMO.

> and build code that will convert this data into a shapefile
> every night, to be used by whatever projects people want to use them
> for, releasing the shapefile

Shapefiles I can take or leave, but others have asked for them so that
would be nice I guess.

> under the same license as OSM.
>

Naturally, since you wouldn't have a choice ;)

Best,

Tom.