[OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap Pledge

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 10:36:51PM +0100, Tom Carden wrote:
> On 30/05/06, Christopher Schmidt <crschmidt at crschmidt.net> wrote:
> > On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 07:59:21PM +0100, Tom Carden wrote:
> >>
> >> Before the 10th of June, so you can show it at Where 2.0?  ;)
> >
> > So *you* can show it at Where 2.0.
> 
> I shouldn't have used a ;) there - it was a genuine question... why the
> two week time limit on the offer?  To be honest, if money is just to speed
> things up, I doubt it will work given that Steve will be at Reboot8 this
> week, and that he has just moved house, and that he has his own things to
> prepare for Where 2.0.  For better or worse, he's still the main
> bottleneck when it comes to implementing serious server-side changes.

After Where 2.0, the promise no longer applies for several reasons:
 * I expect Where (and my subsequent trip to San Francisco) will suck up
   any discrestionary funds I have. If I don't pay out before Where,
   I'll spend all the money on hookers 'n' blow in CA :)
 * If it happens 6 months from now, or even 1 month from now, I can't
   hold up a promise to do something with the data: a month from now, I
   may be unemployed and living on the streets, so I can't hold up my
   end of the bargain. Both of my employers at the moment need me to
   finish Where 2.0 projects for them, so I know that I'm employed at
   least until the conference :)
 * I'm impatient. 
 
> I won't be at Where 2.0, but I take it you meant OpenStreetMap and not me
> personally :)

Right, I was speaking "You" as "members of the OpenStreetMap project". 

> > I would much prefer planet.osm data.
> >
> 
> Cool.  So if we could efficiently generate monthly planet.osm, and daily
> diffs, then that format would be OK.

Yes.

> OK, but it's what Mikel suggested in this thread, that's why I mentioned it.
> 
> >> 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.
> 
> It wasn't a rhetorical question.  I meant why can't *your* implementation
> run on OSM's servers?

Because the implementation I've used, and found to be successful, has
been rejected by the OpenStreetMap project -- specifically, using
geographic file formats and rendering them using MapServer. I was told
this was because "Mapserver is too slow" for OSM's needs.

What I believe is more likely is that mapserver was being used in a way
that it was not as efficient as possible, and therefore, was acting more
slowly than one would expect. In the past month I've been working with
OSM data, I've watched tile rendering times for my OSM based maps
decrease fivefold to twentyfold, as I learned more about how to make
things fast.

It seems to me that OSM does not want to go the route of using
shapefiles and mapserver to render tiles. I understand that. However,
that's exactly the route I want to go, and I'm perfectly willing to
share benefits -- if there turn out to be any -- with the OpenStreetMap
project. But until I can set up something that does the same -- or
better -- than what OSM does now, I can't convince anyone that this is
actually useful. 

In other words, once I *have* an implementation, I'd be glad to run it
on OSM's servers -- if it was desired. Until I do, there's no point in
me wasting anyone's time with a solution that's already been rejected. 
Since the solution in question has already been rejected, it's likely
that members of the OSM project will consider it a waste of time -- so
I'm offering to compensate them for that waste of time monetarily, if it
will help motivate action.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer