[OSM-talk] Software Freedom Day

[Kai Krueger]

andrzej zaborowski wrote:
> 2009/9/5 Apollinaris Schoell <aschoell at gmail.com>:
>>> I agree, maybe it's worth to have a fundraiser for a separate,
>>> official mapnik server + super speedy hosting (unless the people
>>> involved with UCL think that we can have a reliable enough connection
>>> hosted free by UCL, or somebody else wants to offer reliable and free
>>> hosting).  Since it's that important for the popularity of OSM I think
>>> it's well within OSMF mission statement to take on such a project.
>>> And since CloudMade's / others' hosted tiles are also free to use, it
>>> would not take away any money from those companies and remove business
>>> opportunities.
>>>
>> Cloudmade is already doing it. Don't know if they make business or offer it
>> for free here.
>> http://www.whitehouse.gov/change/
> 
> Right, the difference is that with an "official" tile server we could
> have the main page or wiki point users to it.  As it is now a lot of
> people would not agree for the main page to recommend CloudMade as the
> provider of choice and indeed it may be a little unfair.

As long as there is less than about a wiki page full of options, I don't 
see why we shouldn't link to all of the relevant (non)commercial service 
providers that offer services based on OpenStreetMap. CloudMade and 
Geofabrik are the obvious ones here, although presumable not the only 
providers. An alternative is TileDrawer.com which provides an Amazon EC2 
machine image to very easily setup your own map rendering server.

And indeed, the current Tile usage policy page on the wiki ( 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy ) does link to 
commercial service providers for "Heavy Users" already.

So overall the current policy as far as I can tell is that as long as 
you aren't too heavy a user, you can use the tiles offered by 
OpenStreetMap, but the main aim of the Project is to create and offer 
the map data, so OpenStreetMap can't guarantee any availability, despite 
the sysadmins trying there best to provide as high an availability as 
possible for both the API as well as the tiles. Which seems like a 
reasonable policy to me. And over time, the resources to serve Tiles 
will grow as well, with for example a new tile server being installed at 
the moment.

Kai

> 
> Cheers
> 
>