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

[SteveC]

Well let me take that back a bit - actually even doing some very simple cleanup of the interface and having a feedback mechanism *at all* would be a good first step, as people jumped on my recent OGD post in the comments:

	http://opengeodata.org/the-importance-of-timing-to-feedback



On Jun 17, 2010, at 7:27 PM, SteveC wrote:
> I think you're concentrating on tiles, but that's not really the bottleneck I would jump on first.
> 
> The conversation goes like this:
> 
> "steve we have 300 million people a day look at our site and we would like to send their edits and feedback to OSM"
> 
> Really it's the API we're talking about. Tiles are just a CDN problem.
> 
> 
> On Jun 17, 2010, at 7:18 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>> 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"
>> 
> 
> Steve
> 
> stevecoast.com
> 

Steve

stevecoast.com