[OSM-talk] will we be nuked from orbit?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Ulf Lamping wrote:

> Yes, usability is a point where my concerns are as well.
>
> Google will make it damn easy for people to edit stuff, and I guess
> TomTom will do it similiar.
>
> From the three things new users in OSM come in contact with: map, wiki
> and JOSM (online edit is no real choice except for very basic things
> IMHO)
> [...]
> The spirit in the OSM developer community unfortunately still seems to
> be: I'll do the cool new stuff and someone else probably will take it
> and make it easy and shiny.

Oh, come off it. OSM is nowhere near perfect, but we've come on in  
leaps and bounds.

I didn't spend n months on Potlatch for "cool new stuff": after all,  
it doesn't do anything that JOSM doesn't. I spent n months on it so  
that there was an easy, shiny choice for the novice and the impatient  
(of whom I'm one!).

And maybe it is your HO that it's "no real choice", but the amount of  
people who came up to me at SOTM and said "I don't use Potlatch, but  
my dad/brother/uncle/dog does" - which is _exactly_ what it was meant  
for - suggests that there are plenty of people who don't share that  
opinion. This weekend my project is making it usable by schoolkids.

Mapnik and all the effort we've put into the cartography; Etienne's  
wizard new stuff on Osmarender 5; that's all shininess. So, in a way,  
is the amount of effort Jon Burgess and Tom Hughes are putting into  
fine-tuning the servers and the API so that real people can use it.

Have you forgotten what OSM was like a year ago?! Come on.

cheers
Richard