[OSM-talk] AND donate entire street network of Netherlands toOSM
Richard Fairhurst
richard at systemeD.net
Thu Jul 5 10:23:03 BST 2007
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
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