[OSM-talk] open data

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemeD.net
Thu Sep 21 11:50:34 BST 2006


Quoting Wollschaf <mith at uni.de>:

> - Commercial use of OSM data should be paid for to finance the ever
> growing demand of server hardware. Local business displaying a map on
> their webpage or people selling T-Shirts are usually not rich; They should
> be easily able to afford buying OSM data. (10EUR per map on
> commercial webpage, 5% of profit for a t-shirt back to OSM?). Bigger
> projects are out of my imagination. I want people to be able to earn money
> with our free data, but I do not want that none of the profits flow back
> to OSM. Resulting datasets / maps can be restricted in use, as
> freedom of source data has been ensured by payment.

I'm thinking aloud here, but would CC-BY let us "name and shame"?

In other words: require that the attribution is to  
www.openstreetmap.org, hyperlinked. Then, on OSM, list those companies  
who are making major use of OSM data, and say how much they've  
contributed to our servers.

I think the risk of visitors from Google Maps arriving at a page which says:

- Yahoo! has used 90,000km of OSM and supported us with £2m of  
servers, plus free holidays for Steve and Imi*
- Google has used 120,000km of OSM data and supported us with  
precisely bugger all

would be a pretty compelling reason for Google to pay up. Good PR has  
monetary worth (and we've proved that, for a volunteer project, we're  
pretty good at PR), so let's convert it into servers.

cheers
Richard

* not necessarily together





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