[OSM-talk] AND donate entire street network of Netherlands toOSM

[Richard Fairhurst]

Frederik Ramm wrote:

> Admit it, you're a marketing guy as well.

Yeah, but marketing's usually a pejorative word in a crowd of geeks,  
and actually it's the good thing about OSM.

The two reasons why OSM has succeeded, and why People's Map will  
clearly fail, are the community and the sense of fun. And that - not  
the data model (which isn't really a stretch unless you've had your  
mind polluted by GIS people), not the licence (which sucks), not even  
wondrousness like JOSM or Mapnik or even that bugged-to-fuck Flash  
editor which keeps trashing the database - is the principal  
achievement of Steve, principally, and people like Andy. Anyone could  
have done a GPS mapping site - some of us were halfway to it already,  
I stumbled across my never-deployed "upload GPS" code for geowiki.com  
the other day - but very few could have built the community.

So? So we need to remember that occasional flare-ups aren't  
symptomatic of anything Bad About OSM, about any insider/outsider  
split or anything like that. They're just symptomatic of the fact  
we're a bunch of human beings and some of us have tempers. I'm only  
saying this because, though I personally didn't see anything remotely  
objectionable in Martijn's posting, I'm mightily aware that I have a  
much worse temper than Steve does and it'll be me who tells someone to  
fuck off next time. (That'll almost certainly be on legal-talk, if  
anyone wants to watch ;) .)

This means that when there's an issue - like the detail about the AND  
deal - the way to approach it is not really by trying to identify  
fundamental flaws in the project. It's by dealing with the human  
beings, just as you would if you met them in real life, wheedling and  
laughing and chatting and gaining their confidence.

If other projects don't have people ever getting agitated on their  
lists, hey, they're clearly run by androids and I worry about them.  
Plus, many other projects _do_. I don't use Linux,  but I enjoy  
reading Linus Torvalds' rants now and then. And, well, the figure of  
SteveJ calling people frigtards keeps floating into my mind unbidden...

cheers
Richard