[OSM-talk] Survey: How to pay the OSM bill

[Alexander Holy]

Hi,

Being pretty new to openstreetmap, my two cents are:

If I would have to summarize what OSM is or want to accomplish, I would
answer:

OSM is a global, community contributed street map available under CC
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.

So, if you change the license to OSMs data to anything more restrictive than
CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 there is no point to contribute to OSM. If you
restrict the data use to "non-commercial" or any arbitrary type of use, why
do OSM at all?

This also implies: If OSM chooses to run in-map ads and people find ads
annoying, then someone would run alternate servers running the same data
set. You could also turn it around: OSM stays ad free, but someone else
could run a map server (for-profit) with ads as long as he adheres to CC
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.

So I guess in terms of financing OSM is as close to Wikipedia as anything
could be. They turned down the opportunity to run ads, despite the fact they
would literally be a billion-dollar ad business. Wikipedia is run amazingly
efficient at 75K USD/month (see
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/What_we_need_the_money_for)

Alexander