[OSM-talk] Business listings

James Livingston doctau at mac.com
Wed Jul 29 13:25:41 BST 2009


On 29/07/2009, at 5:45 AM, Jack Stringer wrote:
> Should we be charging to upgrade businesses details on OSM?
>
> I think it should be free. You could pay OSM to have a OSM member put
> all the details onto the map for them, saving them signing up etc. But
> I would not like to see charging being the norm. Only because OSM
> exists as a free map service, the same I believe should go for the
> Business data on it.

I'd say it depends on what you are charging them for. I can't imagine  
we (as a community) would be happy with someone using OSM to scam  
money out of people, but there are ways to get money from businesses  
that I think would be fine.


I know a lot of restaurants (and other businesses) that have *really*  
bad maps on their websites. What if you charged them a fair amount of  
money to put their business' location in OSM, give them the HTML  
needed to put an OSM-based map on their site, and went and checked the  
streetnames and landmarks in their area?

You get paid, they get a map that people can actually find their  
business off, and OSM gets better data. 




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