[OSM-talk] Nice problem to have

[Paul Johnson]

On Mar 8, 2012 3:37 PM, "Richard Fairhurst" <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
>
> * 3500 tiles per second. Seriously. In Grant's words on Twitter: "Massive
jump in #OpenStreetMap traffic due 2 Apple news: t.co/nB4ffgYy Fighting
fires 2 keep systems up"

That's incredible!  Explains some of the slowness lately.

> * switch2osm.org fell over. Yep, so many people wanting to find out about
switching to OpenStreetMap that WordPress crapped itself (ok, not the
hardest target but hey ;) ).

That certainly is a nice problem to have!

> * More contributors. We've had people come into IRC saying "I want to fix
this park name, how do I do it?". Regular IRCers have been reporting a
noticeably greater number of new editors in their areas. Or as someone just
asked on IRC: "hmm did the apple fanbois drink the OSM koolaid and crash
our servers with zealous mapping?"

Heh, must have missed that moment.  Or it happened on that other network
and not Freenode.

> * I think we've had a higher peak of publicity today than we've ever had
- higher than the Foursquare switch even, or the Google vandalism incident.
We've been Slashdotted; we're #6 on Hacker News. We've been on The Verge,
Forbes, Wired, Ars, Gizmodo, and all the Mac sites - that's taking OSM to
people who've not heard of us before. We might not be the front page of the
New York Times yet, but we're getting there!

I'd give it a couple days.  It'll happen.

> * And one of the best things has been that people like how we've handled
it. From Forbes: "OpenStreetMap itself has been much more polite about the
whole thing. 'It’s really positive for us,' OSM founder Steve Coast told
Talking Points Memo, 'It’s great to see more people in the industry using
OSM. We do have concerns that there wasn’t attribution.'."

Wow, TPM and Forbes...somehow missed catching that on Google News, links?
I've been Mr. Popular at work because of the publicity today.  I'm often
mapping during downtimes at the office, so quite a few coworkers stopped by
to ask me about that.  Folks asking about OSM completely overshadowed the
fact it's my 30th birthday at work today.

>    From a comment at Hacker News: "While I think it's quite messed up
that a company as rich as Apple can't abide putting credits for people who
have put some really good work in (I've even made small updates to OSM in
my time) I do think that this is a very classy move by the OSM people, no
ranting blog post or 'Apple stole our stuff', welcoming people presents a
much better image of the project."

Well, I think a big help on that is that Apple does distribute other FOSS
stuff, including the GNU Manifesto (irony!) and EMACS in with MacOS.
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