[OSM-talk] Measuring the OpenStreetMap Economy

[Nic Roets]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 5:05 PM, SteveC <steve at asklater.com> wrote:
> Once you have the criteria of what goes in to the measuring pot of the "OSM economy" you further have large error bars on the data for each thing. For example, are those freelancers going to tell you what kind of money they're making?

It's almost pointless to count actual revenue. The reason why no one
started a new competitor to NA / TA in the mid-noughties, was that the
intense competition would reduce revenue making it unprofitable. (Ok
Google started to compete with NA / TA, but they cleverly combined it
with other things like streetview).

Most open source / open content projects are a bit like a security
guard or an external auditor. If all goes well, it will appear to
casual observers that their only function is to consume oxygen. But
take them away and you get chaos.

A better exercise would be to take the page rank of osm.org and
compare it with the market cap of a website with the same page rank.

Or compare the number of tags in our database with the number of tags
in the NA / TA databases and their values on the balance sheets of
their parents.