[OSM-talk] Why PD is not better for business

[paul youlten]

The Orange Telecom/Wikimedia Foundation business model is one that
might work for OSM too.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Orange_and_Wikimedia_announce_partnership_April_2009

Orange pay the Wikimedia Foundation a significant amount of money each
year - not for permission to use the Wikipedia data (which is, of
course, free) but to use the Wikipedia Logo (i.e: Orange see
attribution as adding value to their product). Clearly Orange also
benefit from being seen as a supporter of the Wikipedia project. The
Wikimedia Foundation are on target to raise $1.75m from this sort of
"partnership" 2009-2010.

Clearly wikipedia is bigger and better known than OSM but it was
always held up as a model for OSM.

This kind of financial support is much more likely to happen if we
encourage and make it easy for businesses to use OSM data.

PY

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 9:43 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> paul youlten wrote:
>>
>> I don't understand how a business using OSM data for free and without
>> "thinking of the children"  (AKA "giving back to the community") is
>> bad for the project - every time we get "ripped off" we get a bigger
>> audience, the more people that use the data the more more influential
>> the map becomes and hence the greater the fun in contributing to it in
>> the first place.
>
> That's how I see it, but there are people whose "fun" seems to be reduced by
> the idea that anyone could be making money off their spare time activity.
>
> Probably the same people who, ten minutes later, diligently update their
> Facebook profile so that Facebook gets more advertising revenue ;-)
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
>



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