[OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap Pledge

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 07:59:21PM +0100, Tom Carden wrote:
> 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?  ;)

So *you* can show it at Where 2.0. I've already got a half dozen things
to present, more than I have the presentational time, energy, or
materials to support.

> 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?

Yes, but mikel told me that it would be impossible to generate
planet.osm nightly. I would much prefer planet.osm data.

> 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'm not asking for that.

> >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?).

They're generated on the fly. Why OSM can't generate accurately
projected image tiles on the OSM server on the fly in a reasonable
amount of time that I've never gotten a reasonable answer to. 

> 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.

I don't care what anyone does with it: I've been told that the methods I
want to use for rendering maps don't work for OpenStreetMap. I
personally disagree, so I'll build my maps, and if other people want to
use them, they're welcome to.

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

You can certainly create one. The proper way to do that would be to
create an OpenLayers.Control. The mumbai freemap does this in an easier
way, but just appending HTML into the map div -- see
http://mumbai.freemap.in/ in the lower right hand corner. 

> >under the same license as OSM.
> 
> Naturally, since you wouldn't have a choice ;)

My point was that I'm not looking for special treatment from OSM: I'm
just looking for a useful data export. Persons have expressed concerns
in the past about Wikipedia accepting large donations, and for OSM, $500
is relatively large: there is no concern that I'm attempting to buy out
OSM, I just want something that I can do something useful with.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer