[OSM-talk] Countering Google's propaganda

[Aun Johnsen]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Anthony <osm at inbox.org> wrote:

> 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).
>
> Just another thing that can be implemented in XAPI, extract type of feature
by user to format of choise. The posibilities are there. Now how do we go
about features that have been edited by multiple users? Will user A who
added the road before B's edit accept B exporting it to GMM? Would C's edit
after B's edit but before B's export make a difference? Does it matter that
C have donated his data to PD or not? All issues like that must be handled
before such export function fully implemented. And since GMM suports fewer
features than OSM, than there are no point in doing a full export either.

The point must be that OSM benefits from the data too, and I guess that
giving people who want to contribute to the two projects the ability to do
so with only one edit of the data this opertunity, than the one offering
such export features will have the higher gain.
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