[OSM-talk] Price of non-free geodata

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    whenever I talk about OSM I tell people how free data encourages 
creativity and makes possible a whole bunch of things that weren't 
possible before, how OSM can be used to make cool applications even if 
you're on a very small budget and so on.

Fortunately my bluff hasn't been called yet but to be honest, I have no 
idea about the cost of non-free Geodata. I have some isolated figures - 
I remember someone on this list being quoted a ridiculous sum by the OS, 
and indeed ridiculous quotes are quite common. On the other hand I once 
bought a license to display the whole of NW Scotland at something like 
our zoom level 11 (raster image) on my web site from Bartholomew 
(through streetmap.co.uk) for 50 GBP which looked quite cheap to me.

But what are the tariffs being paid every day for acceptable vector 
data? How many Euros per kilometre of road per year, or whatever the 
quantity of measurement is? I think I could make an even better impact 
on listeners if I were able to put a price tag to our data and say 
something like "in the last three months alone, mappers have collected 
data that would set you back so and so many hundred thousand Euros if 
you were to acquire it commercially" or so, but I wouldn't want to use 
some fantastic number where everbody then laughs and says "yeah, that's 
what it is before negotiation, and after that it's 10% of the sum" or so.

Bye
Frederi

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"