[OSM-talk] ads removed

Nick Black nickblack1 at gmail.com
Fri Jul 6 15:29:20 BST 2007


I'd like to second Steve's dissapointment at the removal of Mappam
ads. My dissapointment comes from what I see as the idealogically
motivated imposition of one point of view, in face of all reason and
rationality.  Most of the arguments against Mappam were personal ones
- 'I don't like ads'.  We have never established if this is felt
throughout the community, or just by the 10 - 20 people who voived
their opposition on this list, and we didn't have time to assess the
financial impact of the ads.

I think some of the opposition stemmed from the lack of consultation
with the community and this is something we can try to learn from, but
something that cannot be effectively acheived all of the time.  Most
of the opposition stemmed from ideaology - its just not good enough to
let an ideology take precedence over reason.  OpenStreetMap has done a
lot to challenge prevailing attitudes within the geo-data market, but
seems to be succumbing to an ideological fallacy of its own.



On 7/6/07, Steve Coast <steve at asklater.com> wrote:
> After a week's trial and discussion I've removed the ads.
>
>
> I'm not doing this because it's really the right thing to do from a
> scientific perspective, that is, do they have a good cost/benefit
> ratio? As they haven't had the time to see. Instead, it's basically
> because of the opinions expressed here.
>
> I think it's a mistake to try and build a Socialist Utopia rather
> than an open map. Naturally, building Free things like operating
> systems and encyclopedias lends itself to those who think money or
> advertising is inherently evil. By refusing advertising out of hand,
> and being skeptical and cynical of things like Yahoo! and AND I can
> tell you that the vocal minority has pushed very valuable people away.
>
> I think the lines have been drawn. Wikipedia is at the continual
> mercy of fund raising drives, and debian has lost out to ubuntu in
> large part due to ideologically driven people. I can see we're going
> down that road, and I think it's a shame. It'll work, no doubt. But,
> that same moral clarity expressed against money and advertising needs
> as a corollary the clarity of what's being lost.
>
> have fun,
>
> SteveC | steve at asklater.com | http://www.asklater.com/steve/
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> talk at openstreetmap.org
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>


-- 
Nick Black
--------------------------------
http://www.blacksworld.net




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