[OSM-talk] Truth about media hype in Microsoft lending big support and big dollars to OSM ?

Lester Caine lester at lsces.co.uk
Wed Apr 4 20:59:52 BST 2012


Joseph Reeves wrote:
> Presumably there's a cost of the bandwidth used and of maintaining the servers;
> running anything approaching a SLA is going to cost.
Actually I'd view that the other way around ...
Potentially reducing the load on their own servers because people will use the 
vectorized maps rather than the raw images.
I don't believe that Microsoft are actually 'investing' much at all, simply 
allowing us to use what they are already having to provide as an alternative to 
Google and Yahoo anyway and a little extra load as we digitize them is probably 
only within the load variation day to day?

> Microsoft get access to the OSM data the same as anyone else, but they also get
> their images vectorised. I don't know if OSM data, or vector data from their
> rasters, is of use to them but its a potential bonus. Certainly if I had a load
> of images of the world I'd donate them and benefit from some crowd sourced
> digitisation.
Microsoft 'support' is purely for brownie points in the open source community so 
they will be more than happy this 'miss-information' that makes them look good? 
I'm happy to make my own material available for anybody to reuse ... my problem 
is getting it scanned in :(

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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