[OSM-talk] Big sponsors (was: WolframAlpha uses OpenStreetMap data)

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Fri Jun 18 02:18:33 BST 2010


Steve,

> They would like to link to us directly but don't think a) we can
> handle the load and b) don't think it would be a good user experience
> to dump people on to osm.org, what with the site design.

To paraphrase (not specifically Wolfram, but the unnamed other megacorps 
you're chatting with):

1. they'd like to link to us directly but our infrastrucutre is too weak;

2. they would not want to give us a shitload of money to improve our 
infrastructure, but could imagine hosting something;

3. there is fear that the community would view this negatively.

To which I say, I don't think the community has anything against someone 
doing a glorified maps.cloudmade.com; if they have really fast servers 
and maybe even a CDN, can do lots of styles and make the tiles and 
services available under a free-for-all policy. That would be great, and 
would - if given sufficient long-term promise by whoever it is - allow 
us to reduce our tile serving to an experimental capacity, freeing up 
resources for the core database which obviously we must keep operating 
ourselves.

But there is a logical problem here and that has nothing to do with us 
at all. You say that many would like to link to OSM directly if only OSM 
had sufficient resources. Now assume that some big guy with many 
enemies, say Google, or Microsoft, were to offer super-fat tile serving 
for OSM as I outlined above. We would then scale back our own tile ops 
to a minimum, and their server would be the main OSM tile server, and 
whenever you go to www.osm.org your browser says "connecting to 
osmtile.google.com" or some such.

I think that the community would be less of a problem - I don't think 
many would care if our tiles came from MS or Google or so as long as 
they were unrestricted and the data remained free. But all those other 
big guys, of whom you say that they would like to link to us - would 
*they* want to send their users to get tiles from Google, MS or someone 
else? Or would the "we'd like to link to you but your infrastructure 
cannot take the load and anyway your front page is ugly" then be 
replaced with "we'd like to link to you but you must understand that the 
'sponsored by XYZ' on the shiny front page is a problem"?

Of course things would be even worse if the big sponsor wanted to put 
the tiles or service under a non-open license (e.g. a license with a 
"noncommercial" component"). That, I think, would reduce overall 
usefulness rather than improving it. Any funded tile serving would have 
to be more open than what we can currently offer, not less.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"




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