[OSM-talk] Countering Google's propaganda

Anthony osm at inbox.org
Thu Dec 31 13:29:16 GMT 2009


On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 6:24 AM, Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 12:30 AM, Roy Wallace <waldo000000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
> > <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> And that's just fine, GMM getting more users doesn't make OSM worse.
> >
> > But there is a limited supply of people willing to become mappers. I
> > see it as a case of market share (between GMM and OSM).
>
> I don't think that either Google or OSM are anywhere near exhausting
> that "limited" supply. When we have, say, 100,000,000 contributors
> each, then it'll become a worry.
>

Maybe, but while the "supply of people willing to become mappers" is
limited, it isn't fixed.  I took a quick look at GMM, and it looks to me
like it's not a bad introductory class for potential OSM contributors.  GMM
doesn't offer anywhere near as many features as OSM, and given their
business model it seems unlikely to me that they ever will.  And then, even
if they do, there would be nothing stopping someone from contributing to OSM
and then importing their contributions additionally into GMM.  If that
becomes something people might be interested in, all OSM would have to do is
offer an easy way to export just one contributors contributions, in whatever
format GMM uses for imports (right now I don't see anything, but in this
hypothetical GMM has gotten it together and started offering the same
features as OSM).
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